Costas Komborozos

Histories Costas Komborozos

Herodotus, the Father of History, appears before a king and tells the story of Anastiades, an unknown warrior who played a vital role in shaping history. He tells the king that Anastiades is real, and that he is not a product of his imagination. The king listens to Herodotus' story, the histories, and attempts to discern whether the story of Anastiades is based on fiction or fact. "You move through human echoes faded. But, unmoved by the elusive death of a curiosity deep and probing, you embrace your self-imposed exile's beautiful solitude. Stranger in exile, tell your story. All things strange become familiar to you. All of history festoons and scrolls under your inquiring gaze. Ionian storyteller, you are no stranger seeking to exploit glory's limelight. You are a stranger made known by making history known. Somewhere, an endless war scar is on the mend, giving you the voice to speak of two worlds: East and West. Father of History, you untomb bloodless truths before me, and bodies in disrepair speak a tongue finite, which lends a voice to crude, unbending war's own infinity. You call upon Clio, the muse of history. She is nowhere in sight. A moment passes. She stands before you, her eyes as blank as history unwritten. And then, if there is a "then" in such a moment, Clio soars aloft above a battle-bruised embankment. She begins to help you tell your story. She observes fact and fancy commingling. Tales of abduction, bravery and revenge fill your story. The histories. Your Ionian storytelling gives breath to my story, whether it be true or untrue. My life is reduced to oral poetry, a long drawn-out account that leads me out of infinity's nowhere and into time's somewhere, from procrastinated life to glorious death. Speak the truth, Herodotus, for it is not sublimely unreachable as my heart would like to believe. Tell my story, embroider it, but remain close to the truth. I stand here on a precipice hopelessly white, watching men march like some ghostly phalanx into a battlefield non-existent. But the tide is restless as always. Loving visages are no more. Aeons fill my bruised, war-trodden heart. Centuries glow anew inside me. But the tide moves again as it always does. Speak no more, Herodotus, for you give the battlefield a name, a face, a heart rending. Your words reach into my eyes, where crystal rivers flow. The histories follow me, and shadows strangely aloof are disentangled no more. Armies clash under an unyielding midnight sky. Stars fade out of fearful recognition. They know that the true night lurks below. But the endless ocean your words form now rise and usurp the skies. The ocean is above me, collapsing drop by drop in the form of rain. Each raindrop fills my tongue and then my heart. But before I know it, the rain becomes the ocean again. The aeon tide is born once more. But it was never gone, was it, Herodotus? Death may have filled it time and again, but it remains. Speak no more, Father of History, for your voice sheds light on a war scar once beyond mend. I rise from a battlefield, unknown and unnamed to anyone but me. But then you speak, and then I am part of the tide. I am the tide. There are no lies to separate from the truth, for the tide of history will shine upon your words and preserve my name. In my no-longer deferred death your own time-treading voice breaks free."