Poet's Choice

While each brave Greek embrac'd his Punk,

Lull'd her asleep, and then grew drunk.

Heroism reaches upward, ambitiously, toward being less like mere humans and a little more like gods; hedonism looks downward, desirously, toward animal satisfaction. Wilmot's poem takes the form of a mordant, funny debunking of Homer's noble Greeks and Romans. What's superhuman is Wilmot's cynicism, doled generously to husbands and wives, Greeks and Trojans, victors and vanquished.

In a very different key, American poet J.D. McClatchy also ponders the comic and the heroic, high aspirations and base desires, wants and lacks, all stirred together:

The News

By seven the old women were leaving

the cathedral's side door, behind them

Christ in a fringed paisley loincloth

and the flaring spray of gold and silver

votive hearts, hundreds of them,

like drops of blood shaken from his face,

and a handful of men were clustered

around the zocalo's only newsstand