Otherness

My love, I had forgotten Smerdis was that Death, 
And Death my Doppelganger throughout my odes.

My poem decries the cycle of civilization. 
How there is always a vacuum left where power begins to fail.

In the Histories, Cambyses campaigned in Egypt, 
After his sire Cyrus had freed all his subjects;
Cambyses sought to reconquer them. 
Thus, Smerdis arose to usurp power from his brother Cambyses---
Yet Smerdis was killed by Darius,
So was justified because Smerdis was a changeling
As the story goes---drawing a comparison with Smerdis 
To the Androgynous mobs of Death.

Yet, I felt the presence of the poem,
That its meaning defied even me...
It was born from this author
But---as the Archer told me in his village---
It had a sense of strange otherness.
What I had made was beyond even my own interpretation.
How I could forget something so key,
There it was, beyond me, something I made and could now rediscover---
A poem I wrote had intrinsic meaning... 
Even its author need rediscover it.

It was, then, its own being,
Like I had given birth
And the child grew.
There the child was,
Born of my seed, 
But something else.