New poem “Our Odysseus” by Ethan McGuire

I 

Surrounded
by too many people
on a much too crowded craft,
I floated home.

Home.
It once meant love and joy to me.
No more.

Now,
I could only see the dock
which we approached
as a frustration,
or even as a bayonet
thrust deep between my eyes.

The dock
rested lazily
near my family’s home,
but I did not feel it possessed,
at this moment,
a greater distinction.
I had no reason to call it by name;
I called it a drop zone.

The sailboats
and yachts
and cruisers
all bounced up and down in the water,
like young children
I wanted to chasten. “Be quite!”

II

The sun
mocked me
with its yellow laser beams,
drilling into my eyes,
burning up
the color-dancing wharfs,
crinkling the paint
on the waterfront
restaurants and condos
that dotted the shoreline.

Here and there a real house,
I mean a real home,
peeked out past
these places of busyness
as if to tease me,
as if to whisper, “Cheer up!”

Yet
all this eye-candy,
it meant nothing to me.
I searched the breeze,
reaching out for anything
to clear my mind.
All I found was more happiness:
the smells these waterfront towns possess,
of soaking wood and drying fish,
of a pleasant sulfur and the salty sea.
These joys could only annoy me then.

III

It’s the same here on the Gulf
as it ever is anywhere,
and soldiers return home today
like Odysseus limping to Ithaca.


Bio: Ethan McGuire works by day as a healthcare information technology professional and by night as a writer, whose poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Better than Starbucks, The Dark Sire, The Dispatch, Emerald Coast Review, New Verse News, The Poetry Pea, and Vita Brevis, among others. His debut poetry collection, Apocalypse Dance, releases through BSC Publishing in the Summer of 2022. Ethan McGuire, his wife, and their new daughter live in the Florida Panhandle near the Gulf of Mexico. You may connect with Ethan on Twitter @AHeavyMetalPen or at TheFlummoxed.com.


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