Mythmaking
They said she loved her son less
than she hated her consort. When
the boy was born they said it was an Egyptian
she touched, a magus,
peddling seduction and cheap amulets.
Olympia said different.
The God Olympia knew, coiled around her,
brown, sinewy, he entered.
She bore divinity, to spite the palace
scolds and shaped a fiction to name her son
immortal like his father-snake.
Philip didn’t care, dallying in the barracks,
currying his horse in the stable, casting knucklebones
in the alley. When he had done with her, he slid away.
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