Why not Lisp on the BEAM - https://lfe.io/.

I prefer to use nbb[0] for this, or babashka[1] when I need to use stuff specific to JVM.

[0]: https://github.com/babashka/nbb [1]: https://babashka.org/

Yes, the newer clojure runtimes like planck or native-image, or babashka definitely take away some of the jvm pain