Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Woven on Moira's Loom
Woven on Moira's Loom
Persephone taught me
everything
I needed to know
how my fate would be
linked with threads woven
on Moira’s ancient loom
my flesh, my substance
my wild instincts
insatiable hungers
how I’d be captured
by a beautiful flower,
seduced to the underworld
an abduction so cruel, yet
necessary, with which
I secretly colluded
picking the strange death flower
planted in the meadow
to fascinate and entice me.
Picking the flower seemed
such a small thing,
yet in retrospect it
opened the gates, swallowing
me into the earth below,
ushering in the dark lord
where union of rape and annihilation
begets the god Dionysos
born full of fruit and wine
a new discovery of inner
resources, all these things
must be paid for
Persephone knew in advance
how I’d be forced, raped
carried off to live in darkness
for so many months
while my mother waited
weeping for my return
Some say it was my fault
I ate the pomegranate willingly
Some say my mother is to blame
Some say it is just a story
about fertile, sunny summer
changing to winter and death
What do I think?
I think Persephone
perceives the flesh
connecting all of us
to each other like a flower
that dwindles and dies
to return in new form
over and over again
as the seasons turn
Peggy Wrenn, December 31, 2010
(Inspired by a poem by Dorothy Walters)
* Moira (Greek) The goddess of fate. The word means ‘allotments.” She is the oldest power in the universe, giving even the gods their circumscribed shares of power. In the Orphic Mysteries, the god Dionysos is born from the rape of Persephone by Hades, echoed in a later version of the tale where Dionysius is born from the head or testicles of Zeus after he mated with and annihilated Semele.
(Image of Persephone by Frederick Lord Leighton)
