“And these things never cease their continual exchanging,/At one time coming together, all into one, through Love,/At another time again borne each apart through the enmity of Strife.”

Empedocles of Acragas, fr. 348 KRS (=Simplicius in Phys. 158,1)

Already, like the Blues and Greens
in the Hippodrome, they’re taking sides:
the poets, the philosophers, the scientists.
They’re making bets, boasts, threats – some 
on behalf of Love, some Strife.
*
The faction of Love assumes they have
the moral high ground.
They suppose her victory means the dominion of Cupids.
They suppose even foes will kiss under streetlights,
once Strife lies supine on the mat.
It’s easy to forget – as they
have forgotten – what a menace Love is.
She mixes the unmixable, mingles
what should be kept apart at all costs;
and the whole time, she laughs.
*
Not that the partisans of Strife
are any better, or wiser.
For all their manly posturing, they might
as well be children playing with matches
in dark closets.
Have they thought of the end, if Strife triumphed?
Have they thought of his bitter loneliness,
holding his bloody sword over the corpse of the woman
he fought and treasured?
His breastplate would rust with tears.
*
I, meanwhile, hold my peace, waving
neither side’s flag.
I sit apart, in a disused corner of the stadium,
brushing cobwebs from my legs – 
friendless, as truth-tellers always are.
No one believes
that Love and Strife, like Oedipus’ sons, are fated to kill one another.
She will hold him close and slit
his neck as he wounds her belly.
Lying together, they’ll make a pretty tableau
for Peace (monstrous Peace) who fights no one,
embraces no one, and crafts her throne at leisure
out of the spoils of the fallen.