Alexander’s second cousin,
with eyes like a stormy sky,
Aeacid blood in his veins,
and ivy-leaves cut round his wrists,
Pyrrhos the Epeirōte, handsome in his tarentine cloak,
watched himself try on faces in a mirror, darkly
preparing for the speech of his life,
with everything on the line.
His stomach churned and his hand shook
as he reached for a horn of wine;
the good stuff planted by Falernus.
It’s funny; he could compel an enemy with a smile,
or gesture,
and knew well the feel of a sharp edge
biting into foeman’s flesh,
the crush of bone,
the smell of a man’s bowels releasing
as psuche departs the body.
It was all too familiar;
he was nearly sick of winning.
And yet his nerve never gave;
truly it was only in confronting death
that he ever came fully alive these days.
But rhetoric was an alien battlefield to him;
not that he ever showed it to his men.
All they or the Romans perceived was the confident,
charismatic king; cunning, calculating, cruel
somewhere between a spider and a God,
and nothing at all like them. They needed the mask,
needed something to believe in.
To fear or to love, he cared not.
And he would give it them,
no matter the cost to himself,
for then they would fight all the fiercer.
And he was an ambitious man,
with elephants.
