Evadne by Rebecca O’Hagan

feathers up close against green background

Photo by Ruben Cespedes on Unsplash

When they brought him home stark

from the bolt of the vengeful god,

I had people

to weigh down his eyelids,

gather pine and olive wood

but also no-one.

My mother named me for all that was good and holy;

her own name I do not know.

I’d heard tell of the birds who rose up preening

from the ashes, felt feathers prickle on my skin.

Between my breasts I could pull out

the softest ones like grass.

Since I was seventeen, I had been lead,

each day the hardest hour of the year.

I’d tried it all: lavender, long walks, the gaze

of another. Arranged the deadness

into dactyls, sang,

and everyone was like

so true bestie same

He was even proud of me

—not a bad man. But the lyre

chelated nothing.

I turned my back to him

and he slept soundly, knowing

heaviness was a woman’s lot

to be gravid with glumness, or our son.

So when I stood on the promontory,

sealed my own eyes against the smoking

last horizon, the heat like sunrise on my face – well,

off I went,

doing something lightly for once, and so what

if they saw nothing but a moth,

a wife who wove

too close to the earth. In descent

oh god

I knew my feathers would not stir

from those ashes, I’m not an idiot,

I needed to feel everything, then nothing,

bequeath my lead

back to the ground and then, by grace,

become an egg again,

and this time no-one

would know me but my mother,

nameless and full of flame.

Bio

Rebecca O’Hagan is a writer and an artist from Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work has appeared in Poetry Scotland and Dark Poets’ Club, and she is the author of the illustrated zines Spa Pool, The Best Supermarket in Edinburgh, and Cherry Print.

Author's note

I first encountered Evadne, who cast herself onto her husband Capaneus’ funeral pyre, in a dictionary of first names I used to read recreationally as a teenager; “an example of wifely piety”, it said. Later on, I found her in Euripides’ The Suppliants, declaiming her devotion in her last moments.

Some figures in mythology appear to us like this: a single name and a single fact. In some ways it seems impious to weave messy human narratives around them, but any act of feminine self-erasure invites a closer look at what else it might reveal; defiance, despair, or a desire for transformation. I asked myself what Evadne might say if she could speak to us honestly, beyond those projections of piety and suppliance.