To Helen, we fight for.
The Face that launched a thousand ships.
The Spartan Queen, who to her rightful throne, we shall bravely restore.
Elysium is he who finds a smile from her rosebud lips.
To Helen, we venture for.
Farmers from fields and princes from towers,
To stand arm and arm; brothers added to the eternal lore,
And the everlasting glory that Troy will rain upon us in showers.
To Helen, we wait for.
Singers do not often muse upon the Trojan beach and the years spent there.
They wail for the battles and disputes, not the comrades and their resting lives.
The princes still squabble, but the farmers, each other, we have come to adore.
On the white Trojan sand, we jovially play like boys, without a care.
Helen will never know our jokes nor jives.
To Helen, she who is our hope.
The gods must protect we who still fight for such a blessed, beautiful Queen.
She is innocent, the dishonest coward stole her, like an indulged boy overfed
That still demands more. It was abduction, rape, not elope, never elope.
The princes insist upon this as they grow marble and mean.
We tell ourselves this as we bury the dead.
To Helen, she who is our hate.
Ungrateful strumpet, who must laugh as she stitches her bloody handiwork.
While good men perish for her soiled name.
Why have the gods been so cruel as to make beauty her fate?
Like Pandora, her fair face must often twist for a sly smirk.
The princes sulk and our corpses does the Trojan soil stain.
To Helen, she who is our woman.
Just a woman, like our own mothers and sisters and daughters and wives.
Perhaps she is the most beautiful woman in the world.
Or perhaps she is plain, and called handsome for the unraveling legend.
But she is a woman, just as we are men, and all of us a human.
In our hearts, we know she is simply another thread in this great tapestry that has cost us all our former lives.
And the princes in silk tents plan tomorrow’s bloodshed as smiles from their mouths are curled.
To Fair Helena, igniting torch of Sparta and of Troy,
And all of Greece and all of mother Gaia’s breast.
Perhaps a virtuous Queen, perhaps a seductress with her selfish boy.
In Helen’s name, either in ships or graves, do us weary soldiers come to finally rest.