Heracles’ Heel
Reportedly, a crab, which Hera sent to vex the hero Heracles, he crushed. Though by its failure Hera was incensed she gave the crab new life and had it brushed and buffed and made a fixture in the sky, the constellation Cancer. It had done its best. Indeed, when he would cast his eye aloft thereafter, when a day had run its course and night come on, great Heracles would see the crab and in his heel would feel again sharp pincers clutch and tear and tease his flesh, and once again have no appeal nor any means to cast off Hera’s chain. Achilles, then, he’d murmur, in his pain.
Dan Campion is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism and co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, a third edition of which was issued in 2019. Dan’s poetry has appeared in Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other magazines. A selection of his poems titled The Mirror Test will be published by MadHat Press in February 2022.
Grand Little Things 