April 20: "Clash of the Titans," Robert Hayden, "Perseus"

One of my favorite movies when I was a kid was the original Clash of the Titans with Harry Hamlin.  Sure, I know the special effects are a little cheesy now, and the acting is not Oscar-caliber.  However, it had togas, naked women, and Medusa.  A teenage boy's Citizen Kane.

Saint Marty is feeling nostalgic this cold, April night.

Perseus

by:  Robert Hayden

Her sleeping head with its great gelid mass
of serpents torpidly astir
burned into the mirroring shield--
a scathing image dire
as hated truth the mind accepts at last
and festers on.
I struck. The shield flashed bare.

Yet even as I lifted up the head
and started from that place
of gazing silences and terrored stone,
I thirsted to destroy.
None could have passed me then--
no garland-bearing girl, no priest
or staring boy--and lived.