A Well-Wrought Urn Poem by Matthew Buchwald

The nubile Bacchic dancers,
Look how they tear the cruel tyrant apart,
And how helpless he now is to resist their assault;
Merciless and unbending, they've grasped him by the arms, by the legs,
Ever severing them, ever tirelessly killing him.

And I a guilty spectator,
Vicarious Bacchante, savoring a king's destruction,
Tragically musing and moralizing, reading the glyphs to decode them,
Till the trope that I want takes hold, until my chimera unfolds,
Till a hideous act is by artifice made to seem bold.