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Johnny Noiπ Jan 2019
Odysseus and Calypso in the caves of Ogygia.
Painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder 1568–1625
Ogygia /oʊˈdʒɪdʒiə/; Ancient Greek: Ὠγυγίη
Ōgygíē [ɔːɡyɡíɛː], or Ὠγυγία Ōgygia [ɔːɡyɡíaː]
is an island mentioned in Homer's Odyssey,
Book V, as the home of the nymph Calypso,
the daughter of the Titan Atlas, also known
as Atlantis Ατλαντίς in ancient Greek.

In Homer's Odyssey, Calypso detained Odysseus
on Ogygia for seven years and kept him
from returning to his home of Ithaca,
wanting to marry him. Athena complained
about Calypso's actions to Zeus, who sent
the messenger Hermes to Ogygia to order
Calypso to release Odysseus. Hermes
is Odysseus's great grandfather on his mother's
side, through Autolycos. Calypso finally,
though reluctantly, instructed Odysseus
to build a small raft, gave him food and wine,
and let him depart the island. The Odyssey
describes Ogygia as follows: ...and he Hermes
found her within. A great fire was burning
in the hearth, and from afar over the isle there
was a fragrance of cleft cedar and juniper
as they burned. But she within was singing
with a sweet voice as she went to and fro
before the loom, weaving with a golden shuttle.
Round about the cave grew a luxuriant wood,
alder and poplar and sweet-smelling cypress,
wherein birds long of wing were wont to nest,
owls and falcons and sea-crows with chattering
tongues, who ply their business on the sea.

And right there about the hollow cave ran
trailing a garden vine, in pride of its prime,
richly laden with clusters. And fountains four
in a row were flowing with bright water hard
by one another, turned one this way, one that.
And round about soft meadows of violets
and parsley were blooming... Calypso's Cave
in Xagħra, Gozo. According to Maltese tradition
this was the cave of Calypso and Odysseus.
Ogygia or Phaeacia have been associated
with the putative sunken Atlantis. A long-standing
tradition begun by Euhemerus in the late 4th
century BC and supported by Callimachus,
endorsed by modern Maltese tradition, identifies
Ogygia with the island of Gozo, the second
largest island in the Maltese archipelago.
Aeschylus calls the Nile Ogygian, and Eustathius
the Byzantine grammarian said that Ogygia
was the earliest name for Egypt, while other
locations for Ogygia include the Ionian Sea.
Many modern scholars are reluctant to place
Ogygia or indeed any of the locations Homer
describes in any existing geography,
and the literary tale is acknowledged
as a work of fictional mythical intent.

                   Geographical account by Strabo,
Approximately seven centuries after Homer,
the Alexandrian geographer Strabo criticized
Polybius on the geography of the Odyssey.
Strabo proposed that Scheria and Ogygia
were located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
At another instance he Polybius suppresses
statements. For Homer says also, 'Now after
the ship had left the river-stream of Oceanus',
and, 'In the island of Ogygia, where is the navel
of the sea', where the daughter of Atlas lives;
and again, regarding the Phaiakians, 'Far apart
we live in the wash of the waves, the farthermost
of men, and no other mortals are conversant
with us.'All these clearly suggest that he composed
them to take place in the Atlantic Ocean."

Geographical accounts by Plutarch also give
an account of the location of Ogygia: First I
will tell you the author of the piece, if there
is no objection, who begins after Homer’s
fashion with an isle Ogygian lying far out at sea,
distant five days’ sail from Britain, going
westwards, and three others equally distant
from it, and from each other, are more
opposite to the summer visits of the sun;
in one of which is the barbarians' fable that
Cronus is imprisoned by Zeus, whilst his
son lies by his side, as though keeping
guard over those islands and the sea,
which they call ‘the Sea of Cronus.’

The great continent by which the great
sea is surrounded on all sides, they say,
lies less distant from the others, but
about five thousand stadia from Ogygia,
for one sailing in a rowing-galley;
for the sea is difficult of passage
and muddy through the great number
of currents, and these currents issue
out of the great land, and shoals are
formed by them, and the sea becomes
clogged and full of earth, by which it
has the appearance of being solid.
The passage of Plutarch has created
some controversy. W. Hamilton indicated
the similarities of Plutarch's account
on "the great continent" and Plato's
location of Atlantis in Timaeus 24E – 25A.

Kepler in his Kepleri Astronomi Opera
Omnia estimated that “the great continent”
was America and attempted to locate Ogygia
and the surrounding islands. Ruaidhrí Ó
Flaithbheartaigh used Ogygia as a synonym
for Ireland in the title of his Irish history,
Ogygia: Seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia
"Ogygia: Or a Chronological Account of Irish Events"
Ogygia is associated with the Ogygian deluge and with the mythological figure Ogyges, in the sense that the word Ogygian means "primeval", "primal", and "at earliest dawn", which would suggest that Homer's Ogygia was a primeval island. However, Ogyges as a primeval, aboriginal ruler was usually sited in Boeotia, where he founded Thebes there, naming it Ogygia at the time. In another account of Ogyges, he brought his people to the area first known as Acte. That land was subsequently called Ogygia in his honor but ultimately known as Attica.
Morgan B Mar 24
What if I waited?
What if I didn’t drag it for so long?
Or was it our destiny
To touch the sky and
Fall back to Earth, split apart?
Caged somewhere
Forced to love and be abandoned,
Did they lead me to Ogygia?
Is this my destiny?
To be stuck in this
Land of nothing,
Trying desperately to
Make someone love me
The same way I love them.
I’ve been tangled
In this cruel life of sorrows,
And intrigues I didn’t ask for,
And anger I can’t contain.
I can’t get out, help me.
Did I give you enough time?
Can I go back home
And make the same mistake
Once more?
I am willing to burn my skin,
The wounds have healed,
The scars are still visible
But they don’t hurt anymore.
I want you to remind me
Why did I suffer so much
And I lost myself to love you.
Put me through Hell once again
Make me agonizing,
My ***** trembling
By the fatigue of not kissing your lips.
Let me touch your flame
And the hole you left in me
Will be filled.
If honesty didn’t work out
I’ll try with patience,
But please don’t slip from
My grip again, I might die.
You condemned me
To live an empty life
Longing for your embrace,
Why did you choose me to
Torment, of all people?
This is an old one, but pain never goes out of style.
What doth lie behind
those otherworldly portals
in link with the mind,
Thought;
Existence rests upon something intangible,
Memory is our cradle
from which we muse upon this design.
Do excuse my wandering mind,
She's still got the liveliness I left behind.

I would implore
the resplendent words
that a daughter of Atlas
might bring forth; a veracious
representation of the world,
To wit, her.

Don't stop writing,
It keeps the mind strong.
for Kalypso;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ej6g3KhinM
kenz Sep 2014
i'm drowning in the  waves
splashing my heart with
the ache that comes with missing you

was i nothing to you all along?

you played me like that favorite song
you could never get enough of;
one day i was the only thing on your mind,
the only murmur to escape  your lips,
until you got bored of the same old tune
and turned the stereo off for good

now it's just white noise
fading with the rainy day sunset,
like apollo left his lyre in the sun to rot
and the music never sang again

my heart never did

even the air can taste the thrall
of dionysus in my breath;
it reeks of  jack these days

did you grow bored of me,
like theseus grew bored of ariadne?

maybe she could tie her string into a noose
and escort me to asphodel


...but i already feel like i'm
the walking epitome of death

a ghost
a whisper    
a shadow in the darkness;          
there but never there

the music has been silent on
this lonely island of ogygia
where you wouldn't stay with me
and i couldn't seem to leave

i spend every night watching you
float back to another world
while i'm stranded on the outside looking in

i know you'll never come back
but i spend every night with my feet in the water
and i pray that poseidon will  carry
your boat back to my shore

*false hope is all i have left
Middle Class Jul 2020
Your eyes they felt, like a  b i g   l a k e
I had been failed, but now I  a m  p i n k
It reaches down and it counts o u t
the grain exhales, through your little hands
in the loose sand
We were one, when my m i n d rests
They can’t touch what I’ve never had

Your focus it felt, like a  t r a n q u i l
A state I’ve never been
Our shoes were all, in the c l o s e t
you use the space to dance for them,
I n  y o u r  t r a n q u i l
Not unaccustomed, but I’d never been
and I  l i k e  i t
fray narte Jul 2020
calypso withers away in a lonely island —
a blunder away from crumbling
at the sight of seaspray and empty towns.

sweet one, this isle is too small
for heartbreaks too big and soon enough,
gods and grecian men
and sad, sad, dead-eyed boys
will be greeted by a mayhem of sobs,
like flies dispersing off a dead body
held together by skin —
pale,
porcelain,
dead —
skin, stretched across these bones,
like the sea stretches across all of its sadness —
and ogygia, a lost isle,
disappears —
a speck of black in a shade of teal;

a pity your heart is not big enough for these sorrows
and not small enough to vanish.

and perhaps, betrayals do not come from
temporary lovers but from your skin
stretching, growing,
making room for years of blunders
until  y o u  are
n o
m o r e
but a name baptized in the wrong side of the war
and caught in a blunder
thousands of years too late.


it's been a long while;
the sun remembers your smile in his death bed, sweet one.
Frisk Dec 2017
Odysseus was washed ashore on this island like a
beached whale, homesick and yearning for hands
that my hands could not fit. he coughs reaching out
for a savior, and water drains from his lungs like he
kept the whole sea – undiscovered - inside him.
sometimes, i have
dreams about drowning.
sometimes, i end up suffocating because
i know Odysseus is not mine to drown in.

“Promise me that this crime of passion doesn’t
find it’s way to Penelope,” I beg for mercy.

“Home is where the heart is – “ Odysseus stubbornly
reminds me, “—But my home does not look like Ogygia.”

It’s always a fever: hungry, insatiable, shameless passion.
when the lion is fed his meat and he cleans the bones,
it is time to move on. the lion can distinguish the elephant
in the room, and swallow the prey until one of us feels
absent and you end up full. what is beyond the veil might
leave us homesick. i take a swallow, and pour the rest
down the drain.

— The End —