No Man Comes Home II — The Son Sent Out
In the second canto of No Man Comes Home, Telemachus leaves Ithaca not as a hero, but as a son forced into motion by a house that will not correct itself.
He had crossed the sea to discover that absence had a body.
That was almost worse.
That night, in the shining house of another king, Telemachus lay awake and understood that news is not restoration. The world beyond Ithaca had honoured his father, enlarged him, confirmed him, preserved him in story, and still none of it placed a hand on the son’s shoulder. He had wanted certainty. He had received scale.
Scale is a cold gift.
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Read the full canto on Substack:
Also in House of Cadmus
No Man Comes Home I — The House Without the Man
Before Odysseus returns, Ithaca has already become a battlefield. Penelope rules by delay, Telemachus grows beneath the weight of absence, and the suitors corrupt hospitality from within. The first canto of No Man Comes Home begins not with the hero, but with the damage made by his absence.
Bellerophon and the Borrowed Height
Bellerophon begins not in triumph, but under sentence: renamed by blood, purified beneath guest-law, and sent east carrying the sealed order for his own death. This House of Cadmus Greek myth retelling follows the man who rises by Pegasus — and mistakes borrowed height for possession.
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On The Lantern Chronicles, I gather writings from Angkor, myth and legend, contemplative essays, and poetry — works shaped by silence, beauty, wonder, memory, and the deeper questions that follow us through the world.
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