Cassandra

The first poem in an ongoing project. Based on the Greek myth of the same name.

I bathed in the Castalian Spring.
I burned laurel until the gods answered.
I watched the goat shudder.
Apollo was ready. So was I.
But no one ever is.
I took my place on the tripod,
a throne of bronze and bones.
Smoke coiled through my teeth.
The earth moaned through its breathless crack.
I saw everything. I said everything.
And still—
you call me mad.
They came in gold, in fear, in arrogance.
With pelanos cakes, with coins, with goats,
with questions already half-answered.
They asked: Should we go to war?
They asked: Will the harvest fail?
They never asked: What do you see?
Only: What will he say through you?
I gave them riddles.
They called them riddles because they did not like the answers.
I said: Beware the wooden gift.
I said: Your sons will not return.
They nodded. Smiled. Built statues
to the men who ignored me.

Leonidas held a pass.
They wrote songs.
Miltiades led a failed charge.
They carved his name in stone.
I watched both ends of a war,
both tides of blood,
as if I had seen it all before.
And I screamed: stop!
They called me coward.
Achilles had his heel,
but they still called him god.
Hercules killed his family,
and they gave him a second chance.
I warned.
I warned, I warned:
No statues. No sons.
Philip crowned a boy
who would burn the world.
They called it empire.
I set a fire in my mouth—
they called it hysteria.

Ask Pythagoras. Ask Plato.
Men with chalk and marble.
They drew their truths in straight lines.
Mine spiraled like smoke—
so they called me a liar.
Pythagoras heard numbers in the stars.
I heard children in the walls of Troy.
Which of us was sacred?
Who did they believe?
Plato turned cave shadows into truth.
I watched cities crack
before the first stone fell—
yet they still called me a shadow.

Apollo kissed my mouth and called it a blessing.
When I said no,
he gave me prophecy
and laced it with silence.
He spoke through me.
Then over me.
Then about me.
You don’t refuse a god.
You don’t say yes and stay whole.

They said I spoke in tongues.
I said: The horse is hollow.
They said I was lying.
I said: Your daughters are burning.
They said I was dramatic.
I said: So is prophecy.
They turned my visions into metaphors,
my certainty into madness,
my voice into static.

I have been the Oracle,
the priestess, the prize.
Gods blessed me,
but men tore me down,
saying I was too much,
too soon, too loud.
I sat in the adyton—
a chamber sunk like a wound.
They called it sacred.
It was a cage.
They gave me power wrapped in gold thread,
which choked me.
They asked for omens
but never answers.
They bowed before the altar
and still looked past me.
Know thyself, the wall said.
Nothing in excess.
So I gave them everything.
Too much,
too soon.

I saw Paris cradle ruin like a lover.
I saw Helen at the shoreline,
and the sea foam parted like guilt.
I saw Iphigenia walk to the altar
and no one flinched.
I saw Megara scream beneath her husband’s fists.
They wrote only of his pain.
I see her in every court case now—
her voice on mute
while headlines ask
if she provoked it.

They come to me even now;
CEOs and presidents,
generals and girls.
Will my startup fail?
Should I take the job?
Should I leave him?
Will the war start here?
I give them what they already know. They call it divine.
Only now the questions come by email.
I reply in riddles:
There is always a gate.
There is always a horse.
There is always a man inside it.

Now they diagnose what they once cursed.
Call me borderline.
Call me unstable.
Call me overreacting.
Call me an unreliable narrator
of a story I wrote in smoke
before the first flame touched the city walls.

People often say that history repeats itself.
I say:
It never stopped.
I warned.
I warned, I warned.
It didn’t matter.
I warned. I warned, I warned.
It doesn’t matter.

They think I died in Troy.
They think I ended with my hair torn
and my blood on the altar.
But I am the stain that won’t lift from the temple wall.
I am the breath in the next girl’s lungs as she says no,
and no one listens.
I am déjà vu.
I am the one who sees the storm,
while others see only sunshine.
I am the myth,
because the truth is unbearable.
I am the prophecy.
And I am what happens
when no one believes it.