“Tie me to the mast, my sailors
Knot the ropes steadfast, my jailors
For one cannot be admiring for long—
without going crazy—the sirens’ song
And I need to hear it before I die
Without doing so in the process, so let’s give this a try
Now, we’ve got a contract, we’ve got a pact
Don’t release me however I act
I’ll scream and I’ll shout, I’ll curse to the max
But you won’t hear a thing, your ears filled up with wax
Just sail straight ahead and pay me no heed
Don’t loose me one bit ’til we’ve finished this deed”
After a time on the sea, stirred within him strong emotion
Sweet sounds, from green fields, lilting across the ocean
Odysseus saw beautiful women, singing him songs of glory
The oarsmen brave enough to look, had never seen creatures so gory
He writhed and wriggled, with struggle and strain
But they’d agreed not to release him, no matter his pain
He now existed only to get closer to those voices
And cursed that he had stripped himself of all desirable choices
As he yearned and yearned for their gilded locks,
The men rowed on, avoiding this barren land’s rocks
Just a little ways to go ’til they could say they’d bested these beasts mythical
As they made their uneventful way back home, to Ithaca
Not before long, they again had reached land
By golly, by gosh, it worked just as planned!
They emptied their lobes
And untied his ropes
And the townspeople came down to celebrate in the port
And everyone had a good aul’ cavort
For years and years they said it couldn’t be done
But this genius team had surely just won
In the celebration and uproar, they cracked open a cask
As one of the oarsmen turned to Odysseus to ask
“What was the song like? How did they sound?”
But he’d jumped off the harbour, tried to swim back and drowned.