THE SONG OF ACHILLES by Madeline Miller

“The Greeks sail, and take my hope with them.

I cannot follow.

I am tied to this earth where my ashes lie.
I curl myself around the stone obelisk of his tomb.

ACHILLES, it says, and nothing more.

He has gone to the underworld, and I am here.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

“- Have you no more memories?
I am made of memories.
– Speak, then.
I almost refuse. But the ache for him is stronger than my anger.
I want to speak of something not dead or divine.
I want him to live.

At first it is strange. I am used to keeping him from her, to hoarding him for myself. 
But the memories well up like springwater, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth.

This, I say.
This and this.
The way his hair looked in the summer sun.
His face when he ran.
His eyes, solemn as an owl lesson.
This and this and this.
So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.

She closes her eyes. She listens, and she too remembers.
She remembers feeling the child within her, luminous in the dark of her womb.
She repeats to herself the prophecy that the three old women spoke to her: <<your son will be greater that his father.>>”

I conjure the boy I knew.
Achilles, grinning as the figs blur in his hands.
His green eyes laughing into mine.
– Catch, he says.
Achilles, outlined against the sky, hanging from a branch over the river.
The thick warmth of his sleepy breath against my ear.
– If you have to go, I will go with you.
My fears forgotten in the golden harbour of his arms.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

“I have told her all. I have spared nothing, of any of us.

– I have done it, she says.
At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone.

ACHILLES, it reads. And beside it, PATROCLUS.

– Go, she says. He waits for you.

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk.
Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun.”

Kindle, 2022