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  Composer:
   Ed Hooke

  Written:
    November 2020

  - February 2021

                         
   Recorded:
   February 2021

You creaked ajar
an unhinged door.
Wisdom, love, power
- conflicts of yore.
A stolen bride.
Ten years of war.

A thousand ships.
 A hollow horse
stood by Troy’s towers,
dribbling…

Blackthorn.
Hera’s Spawn.
Strife-torn trail
Twin Peerless.

Unpicked.
Fools tricked.
Imperfect.

Conflict Engineeress.

A wedding feast
by heaven blessed.
Shunned, still came
uninvited Guest.
Cast golden apple
to contest.
Which divine beauty
bribed the best?
- judged by Cassandra’s
sibling...

Harmony & beauty

be yet partial tapestry.
Reflections’ blind sections
ply deceptions.

Who’d plan it?
Planet redefine.
The Tenth subtracting
one from nine.

Dark god
to darkness reconsign.
Superiority is Thine.

Ill-judged those
who dismiss You.

Two boastful lovers, set a test.
The loser, unduly distressed
enslaved the sister he’d undressed,
feasted on succulent, sliced breast
to meat his own sweet issue.

Commentary
The Olympian goddess of discord, Eris is perhaps most famous for initiating the Trojan War. All the Olympian gods & goddesses had been invited to the wedding of Thetis & Peleus except for her (since there was said to be no place for discord on such an occasion...) Snubbed, she turned up anyway and threw a golden apple inscribed ‘for the fairest’ into the party.  The goddesses Hera, Athena & Aphrodite all claimed it & required Paris (a mortal & aTrojan prince) to award the prize, offering him incentives according to their particular powers; power, wisdom & love.  Paris chose the last of these, offered in the form of Helen of Sparta, allegedly the most beautiful woman in the world, unfortunately already married to the Spartan king, Menelaus.

Another tale featuring Eris’s involvement concerned Polyteknos & Aedon who claimed their love for each other was greater than that of the supreme deity couple, Zeus & Hera.  Angered, Hera sought Eris’s intervention.  Polyteknos was working on a chariot board while Aedon was weaving a web.  Eris told them that whoever finished their task last would have to present the other with a female servant.  Aedon won.  Unhappy at his defeat, Polyteknos raped Aedon’s sister, Khelidon before disguising her & presenting her to Aedon as a slave.  Having found out the truth, Aedon chopped up Polyteknos’s son and fed the pieces to him..

The black thorn plant is a symbol for Eris.  Some accounts say she is the daughter of Hera, others that she is the daughter of Nyx (night).  Ares, the god of war, is her twin brother.

Eris is celebrated in various ways.  Apart from her role in music, her name was given to a Kuiper belt based dwarf planet whose discovery in 2005 (and superior mass) led to the redefinition of the word ‘planet’ and Pluto’s demotion from planetary status.

Eris was adopted as the patron deity of the Discordian religion, begun in the 1950s.

Invoke not wrath thou canst afford
for She Whom ancient lords ignored

instead should stand worshipped, adored.

Snub not the glorious Goddess of discord.

Out of sight
Kuiper belt Dweller
Daughter of the darkest Night.

Review
The music started like Tom Waits (circa Rain Dogs) then went nowhere I had imagined but fun and brilliant all the same .
                                                                           [David John Peel, Liverpool]