ersephone
by Kelsey Willis
Canto I
The fields are whispering to each other in their secret
language
of viridian and emerald.
There is someone within them
over there,
in the wild grasses,
see the maiden sitting there.
Who is that?
The grasses whisper amongst each other
a-frenzied by this question.
That, in the field, they are a bit furious to have to
point out,
that maiden in the field is
Persephone.
Persephone.
Soil-maiden,
Demeter-daughter,
Persephone-Kore.
Persephone in the middle of the field,
her white arms gathering bright flowers to her,
threading them into vines and
crowns of the earth.
There is someone who should not be there:
the man, clad in shadows with the smile that can suck
the marrow from your bones and then use
your skeleton to pick the shreds of it from
his teeth.
Canto II
The grasses are rustling
there is something wrong,
there is something wrong
Persephone's head snaps up.
The flowers fall.
She begins to back away.
The grasses whisper furiously,
this is an infraction of the highest degree.
The shadow-man is approaching her, smiling that marrow-
sucking smile.
His form is strange, it shifts, it coils.
She can see him hold out his hand and all is
still.
Does she know who this is?
The grasses are concerned.
Someone should tell her mother.
Something deep down in the earth is stirring,
in the bedrock,
in the loam,
in the tiny atoms that make up a speck of the dirt
beneath her feet
she can feel it start to tremble,
feel the movements through the soles of her bare feet,
travelling up to elicit a reply of shuddering that
starts
at the base of her spine and snakes its chilly way
down her back.
Persephone's skin feels like it is the dead of winter.
White-skinned Persephone places her fingers about his.
Her white hand is closed in his black grasp.
And
Persephone understands
Canto III
Too late, she starts to pull back
his grip is tighter now.
No can escape from
the grip of this shadow-man.
The earth is waking and shifting and cracking.
Now,
a fissure
into the earth
into the below.
He backs into that hole.
He pulls Persephone with him into the earth.
Persephone goes underground with the Lord-King of the
dead.
Canto IV
She stumbles along on the dirt road,
crumbling beneath her feet.
Bare skin and
there is something moving in the loam.
(the worms are turning it and
her stomach begins to turn)
She can feel the death moving around her
sliding over her skin:
flesh and
organs, visceral fluid, blood
rotting.
Her hand is still in his,
smooth upon her skin.
How it slips and slides against everything and nothing
has a grip anymore.
She has, however, not lost the grip that the hand has
upon her own.
She tries to pry her fingers
loose, loose
from the bones
that circle around her limb,
pushing her knuckles close together as a warning.
Do not escape.
Do not try to escape.
Do not even entertain the idea of escape.
(it is not possible to)
Canto V
His voice is the rumble of the earth,
is the whispering voices of the dead caught
between the rays of twilight at
dusk's edge and
dawn's toe-tips.
His words swim around her head,
fish fleeing the net of a captor.
Persephone is a caught fish.
Persephone is his wife.
Something is shifting within her now,
something changing.
He is pulling her deeper under the ground,
deeper into his domain,
leaving the sunlit realms behind and going somewhere
only the
whisperings in her
head during sleep
have dug
up.
She is following him willingly now,
feeling a coiling in her belly.
Warm.
His voice is
soft, whispering murmurs
in her ear, his breath
upon the small seashell, vocal
warmth upon the
flesh
She is pulled close.
Persephone cannot see very well in the darkness
and the Lord-King of the Dead fills
her vision, fills her senses.
Persephone cries out, a loss, a gain.
Something shattering
deep in the underground, the queen cries out.
wish to speak is
finis -
Demeter wanders the earth.
There is nothing so inconsolable as
a woman who has lost her
child
Persephone is gone,
Demeter weeps
the world slips into the ice.
But, oh!
The grasses know where the daughter is,
they saw the daughter within them,
where she was to have been safe
within a protective canopy of
emerald.
Through the translation of rustling
in the language of viridian,
the grasses tell all they can
while succumbing to the frost
coverings that break and shatter
them.
The grasses tell the tale.
Persephone in the grass,
the shadow-stranger,
with his hand outstretched
beyond the invisible threshold
that shatters something within everyone
and the look in Persephone's eyes.
Demeter quavers.
Canto VII
Persephone has not eaten.
She is an appetite not suited to food.
she does not hold attention to the nourishment through
her lips.
She shines in the underworld.
Hades believes his wife to be beautiful.
No food.
No water.
No nourishment.
No sustenance.
Persephone is wasting away, she is
becoming like the very dead
who wait upon her hand
and foot.
Persephone feels the
stirring of memory,
locked-away beyond doors with cracked
light peering out from underneath, a face,
not her own but almost like.
Mirror-distorted.
Canto VIII
Demeter wanders.
Persephone clutches at
memories that swim
around her head
like birds.
Hades keeps her hidden away, safe from everything.
She is dying in the underworld.
He knows that and still
he keeps the shining creature captive,
holding her in his hands like a sparrow.
Persephone is dying.
Persephone is a skeleton dancing in shoes of gold and
with a smile that chills the marrow in bones now.
She is dying and still
will not eat of the food brought to her.
It is filled
with worms and holes and
pieces of dead things held together with
stitchery of veins and sinew
to form new food that will
kill her the instant it passes through her thin lips.
She can see through the guise that is wrapped around
these foods.
She can run
the length of the banquet table
(though she stops every
few steps and her
labored breathing
almost ceases)
and see the rotting flesh in place of the foods.
There is one thing on Persephone's plate.
Sliced open
flesh cleaving to the world
seeds within
It sits there, amongst
the rotting things with their pungent ordors
but Persephone can smell above them
and can smell the
fruit. She picks it up; it leaks juice upon her hand.
It cannot hurt to have one piece of it?
Not even a bite, a seed.
Two seeds.
Three.
Six.
Six seeds pass
Persephone's lips, teeth, tongue, esophagus, into her
belly,
deep where they are planted.
She has eaten the food of the dead.
She cannot ever go home again.
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