Voices from the hard core

This poem follows the call of a troop moving across myths and historical eras - from the Peloponnesian War to the trenches of the 20th century, the invasions of the 21st. It listens to the motives of departure, traces invasion and occupation - of terrain, of language -, sees the traces of devastation and devastation in the minds, on the battlefields, asks about the exhausted happiness of returning home. Why do people flock together and obey an order? Why is there fighting, why is there killing? The voices raised here are those of invaders, colonizers, marauding multitudes, and their victims. Two figures emerge as individuals: Lord Byron, the poet strategist, and the mythic figure of Philoctet as the wounded man without whom victory cannot be had. With the violence of the object corresponds the austere.