Fantasy, Mythology, Larceny: A Poetry Chapbook

By Ibrahim S. Amin

From Troy to orcs to burglary,

King Arthur's sword to blasphemy,

A necromancer's dating life,

A hero's existential strife,

A mage who walks her world alone,

The poems vary, form and tone,

There's humour, wanking, blood and gore,

A sonnet, villanelle, and more,

If rhymes won't please you, nothing will,

So sneak inside and loot your fill.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debonair Walrus
• Release date: Sep 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215771952

Ibrahim S. Amin

Ibrahim S. Amin was educated at the Manchester Grammar School, the University of Newcastle, and the University of Manchester. He wallowed in education for as long as he could, earning his PhD in Classics & Ancient History. At that point he ran out of excuses and joined the real world — where he now writes to support his unhealthy takeaway addiction.

Book preview

The Ithacan's Lies

The horizon's a rage of the rocks, sea, and sky,

And his memories churn in the spray of their gore,

Many thousands of stories, the scar on his thigh,

And they're ebbing and flowing with foam on the shore;

In the wine-darkest oceans that crash in his eyes,

He is lost in the waves of the Ithacan's lies.

––––––––

Did he weave a deception: the lunatic's plough,

When he yearned to escape an agreement he swore?

Or was madness the truth, did his sanity slough

Off a shattering brain into visions of war?

In the wine-darkest oceans that crash in his eyes,

He is lost in the waves of the Ithacan's lies.

––––––––

Did Achilles once cleave through the legions and fall,

In his armour that blazed with his wrath and his hate,

Or a murdering pirate invented it all

When he dreamed of a man of more glorious fate?

In the wine-darkest oceans that crash in his eyes,

He is lost in the waves of the Ithacan's lies.

––––––––

Did he scheme up a horse and then hide in its bones,

For the heavens had destined the sacking of Troy?

He remembers a priestess who screamed and her moans,

But in stories there's justice for pillagers' joy;

In the wine-darkest oceans that crash in his eyes,

He is lost in the waves of the Ithacan's lies.

––––––––

Did the monsters and curses bring doom to his crew,

Now immortal in legends, where heroes belong?

Or did raiding and robbing just slaughter them too,

When that siren ambition ensnared him with song?

In the wine-darkest oceans that crash in his eyes,

He is lost in the waves of the Ithacan's lies.

––––––––

Did a hero return and reclaim what had been,

In the love of a wife and a crown on his head,

Or else plunder a palace and laugh at a queen

Who still mourned for a husband then twenty years dead?

In the wine-darkest oceans that crash in his eyes,

He is lost in the waves of the Ithacan's lies.

––––––––

Now the truth is forgotten, the stories still heard,

And they echo in song and in ink and in fame,

In the centuries shaped by the weave of his word,

And the glory that dwells in the sound of his name;

In the wine-darkest oceans that crash in his eyes,

We are lost in the waves of the Ithacan's lies.

~~~~~

I watched Tony Robinson narrate Odysseus: The Greatest Hero of Them All on Children's BBC when I was a boy, and it was a big part of why I fell in love with Greek mythology. It introduced me to the great heroes of the Trojan War, to Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon, to Paris and Hector, and to Odysseus himself, and it kept everything that made their ancient stories so powerful whilst adding bits of humour and pathos of its own. Around a decade later,