Ruins of Ilium

When he was a boy

Digging in the dirt

Outside his palace bedroom,

Priam discovered,

On the very morning

Of an earthquake 

That had toppled many buildings in Ilium,

The ruins of a prior age.

And in the span of years

Following the spectacle

Of Helen’s absconding,

There was another boy

Digging another hole,

And finding ruins of a prior age.

And many more years beyond that,

Four hundred or so,

There was a poem

That in millennia to follow

Scholars could not agree

If its author were mythical

Writing about mythical things.

Such are the ruins of Ilium.