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Canto I: Persephone
Persephone with the delicate ankles
Spotted him first standing alone in the olive grove,
A tall, black shadow in the bright noon,
Among the glossy leaves.
Not really standing – lurking.
No other word would suffice.
His eyes followed her as she wandered the meadow
Picking irises and hyacinths.
He twitched like a foal every time she plucked a narcissus,
But he came no closer and said nothing
That first day.
She glanced back when she heard her mother calling her home,
But he was gone.
The next day, she found a bouquet of flowers –
Narcissi and irises and hyacinths –
Tied with dry sheaves of wheat shorn of grain
Like bodies without heads,
And knew at once his handiwork.
Again he stood under the olive trees, hunched,
For the olives were not tall but he was, watching her.
“I know who you are,” she called to him.
“My uncle, on both my mother’s and my father’s side.”
Such things raised no eyebrows among their kind,
But even so: he scowled,
Dark as his misty realm, and vanished
As though the earth had swallowed him.
Persephone took his present home,
Although she knew her mother would deplore cut flowers.
The third day, he was not among the olive trees,
Slender as their trunks but much darker, a shadow casting no shadow,
And Persephone, curious, stole into the olive grove to find him.
Deep among the trees he stood, holding his horses’ bridles,
His golden chariot dwarfing the olive trees.
He started when she came upon him,
And Persephone scowled: “Not on your life, lord of the dead!
One word from me, and the trees will tear out their own roots
To protect me. I’ll go nowhere with you like this.”
He matched her scowl for scowl and took a step closer,
His horses neighed, and Persephone clapped her hands
And dissolved into a murmuration of starlings,
Which shot through the grove like arrows,
To settle safely in the middle of the open field.
She stood up to see him stopped at the edge of the olive grove,
Staring. “Use your words,” she said.
Hades opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again.
His jaw almost creaked with disuse. His words, when they dropped,
Fell like pebbles, clattering and rolling at his feet.
Persephone sat down in the field, on the summer-thin grass,
And said: “Tell me more.”
She was late coming home, the sun long gone,
The western sky a narrow streak of crimson over the churning sea.
“Where have you been?” her mother fretted.
“Picking flowers with Ianthe and Chryseis,”
Persephone said, not caring if she was believed.
Her mother’s look was haughty and hard,
And she turned her back on Persephone when she spoke:
“You are a terrible liar.”
Persephone kept her words inside,
Like pebbles in her throat, and thought: a night and half a day.
And then she’d fly.
Canto II: Persephone and Hades
In Hades, the dead murmured everywhere – bats rather than starlings –
And mist folded itself into every nook and cranny.
Persephone woke with mist woven through her sheets,
She brushed tendrils of it from her ivory comb,
It trailed after her like dust kicked up by her feet.
Her husband was not kind, but he had other qualities,
And anyway, Persephone imagined that her father,
Who loved to hear his own thunder, must have thought he’d tricked
His brothers into giving him Olympus, while they got the sea
And the land of the dead to rule.
Hades and his realm were ideally matched,
Yet every good match needs a bit of spice. That was she,
And her husband relished her, and she him.
But she too needed something more. “I miss the sun,”
She sighed one day, and Hades started
And looked at her like she was a viper that had stung him.
“I don’t mean all the time,” Persephone explained.
“But sometimes. And flowers, and grain growing long and green.
I miss the taste of food. Sometimes.”
Hades said nothing, though his teeth ground like boulders.
Food is the delight of the mind, but he had been lord of the dead a long time,
And Persephone wondered if he could still remember
What ambrosia tasted like, or a ripe plum, or the smoke rising
From an altar: no one made sacrifices to Hades,
For death came one way or another, and drawing his attention was unwise.
Persephone did not expect him to understand,
Only to believe what she said was true.
Soon after, he summoned her and pointed at the gloomy vault of rock
And cobweb that served in place of the sky.
She saw it at once:
A spot of green, a tiny leaf like a translucent dragonfly’s wing,
A shock of the new in an unchanging place – a young shoot
Growing upside down, reaching from the earth into the underworld.
Demeter had stopped wheat and fruit and flowers from growing
In her sorrow and rage, and so what could seeds,
Thrown into plowed fields and left covered in the earth,
Do but reorient themselves to grow toward the next best thing,
The girl who was half harvest, half thunder
And now ruled the underworld?
Persephone laughed and clapped her hands.
As they watched, more shoots sprouted, reaching down to them,
Entire fields of wheat growing upside down,
Meadows of grass and flowers, trees with their fruit
Dragging the branches straight down
Like startled hair. Persephone ran and danced under this bounty,
Jumping up and laughing even harder when she failed to reach
A plum, a spring onion, an apple,
Like a happy Tantalus.
Hades scowled to see this disruption, but he did love to see her laugh.
With no birds to peck at ripe fruit, no cattle to graze,
No wolves and bears to hunt for deer and stray cows,
All that color and sweet scent and fruit bursting with juice
Would have gone to waste. Persephone was troubled.
She was daughter to the goddess who brought food to human tables
And sacrifices to the gods’ altars. She did not know
What to do about an excess with nowhere to go.
Then she noticed the dead – her husband’s many guests –
Behaving strangely. Usually they flitted about, murmuring shadows,
Thirsty only for blood and envious of life. Now a shadow carried a flower
Between its wispy fingers. A shade gnawed on a fallen pear
With toothless, smoky gums. Groups of the dead sat
Under the wheat fields ripening and swaying on the stone vault,
Moving their arms and sighing like the wind in the sheaves.
That night – or whatever passed for night in a place with no diurnal cycle –
Persephone sat up in bed so the covers fell off her,
For she knew how Hades had always liked to watch her,
And said: “You know they won’t let this continue, up there.”
What in Hades, Hermes had eloquently said
When he’d arrived bearing the gods’ message of despair and seen
The land of the dead full of shades sucking on ripe fruit,
Plaiting flower wreaths, playing with ripe grain like knucklebones,
While man and animal and bird starved up above
And gods went without sacrifices.
“Hermes will have told my father everything by now,” Persephone said.
Hades scowled to think of his brother up on Olympus,
Playing with everyone’s destinies. “And you don’t like it much either,”
She continued. “Don’t deny it. It’s only to please me.”
He looked away. She hugged her knees and thought.
“My mother has caused enough mayhem. She’ll get me back now,
It is certain. And I do still miss the sun. So listen:
Here’s what I think we should do.”
And he listened.
Canto III: Persephone and Demeter
At first, her mother watched her all the time,
An eagle in the daytime and an owl at night.
Persephone had suspected it would be thus, but even so
She nearly ran to the nearest well or deep cavern
And flung herself down at least once a day,
Trusting that Hades would break the deal and open the gates
Of his domain to her ahead of schedule,
For in the end, what could even the gods do
Against the one who received almost everyone as a guest eventually?
Still, she did not test this hypothesis,
But kept her peace and endured her mother
Trailing her every move. Persephone understood:
You can’t run away from home without breaking someone’s heart,
Even if you think they deserve it, even if you’re running for your life.
Persephone knew she was clever,
But she’d forgotten she got that from her mother.
Persephone had thought the seven pomegranate seeds
Which she had told Hades to feed her, would split her year in two,
One half filial duty and sunlight, the other half spice and queenship.
“Did you forget,” Demeter asked, watching her closely,
Like she was looking for a dropped stitch, even though her eyes
Were still filled with tears, “did you forget that growing season is
Two thirds of the year, and winter only one third?”
Persephone blinked, hoping her face was still,
And said, hating the moment’s weakness,
Knowing Hades would understand,
But hating it still: “He tricked me.”
Then, a mere moment’s work to remember who she was
And draw strength from it, “I’m here now, mother.
Isn’t that something?” Demeter said nothing,
Just watched and kept watching her, like she was Argos
And Persephone was Io, one of her father’s momentary whims,
Their lives utterly changed by that one moment.
Unlike Io, Persephone had made a choice,
And now she had to pay and keep paying.
“Where are you going?” “To fetch water, mother.”
“Where did you go just now?” “To the outhouse, mother.”
“What are you doing?” “Making bread for tomorrow, mother.”
“And what else?” Persephone said nothing. “And what else?”
Demeter’s voice as quick and sharp as an adder. Persephone said nothing.
“You are a terrible liar.”
Persephone still said nothing, but it was close.
Hades had rarely spoken, yet she’d never learned the trick from him.
Their time together had not been that long.
Maybe next winter…
“What are you thinking about?” “Nothing, mother.”
The silence was all too brief. “He took you from me,”
Demeter said, and Persephone, who had heard this all before,
Still marveled at the bitterness in the last two words.
She did not say “yes, mother” or “I’m sorry you suffered, mother.”
She went on kneading dough.
Her resolve broke only once,
When she turned on Demeter and said, quick as a lash,
“I know about the little boy you nearly made immortal.
You replaced me quickly enough. Maybe he’d have been grateful
If you’d told him about it often while he grew up.”
Persephone regretted the moment’s sweet release
Instantly and a for a long time to come,
For Demeter wept, of course, and said she too was only human
For all that she was also a goddess, and had needed solace,
And tried to do her best. So Persephone hugged her,
And said “oh please mother, don’t cry,”
And knew she’d have to stay close to home for at least a fortnight
Till Demeter calmed down.
Eventually, day by day, Persephone ventured farther from home.
“Where are you going?” “Out.” Like a ritual incantation.
She’d pack bread and cheese for her lunch, glance back
From the threshold: “I’ll be back, mother.”
Demeter’s face unmollified, her mouth proudly shut,
Her eyes hooded still with the knowledge they shared
But did not speak aloud. One day, Persephone told herself,
She’d tell Demeter: “I wanted him to take me,
And you almost killed the world rather than let me go.”
And another thing, the final blow: “You knew.
You must have known.”
One day, but not yet.
Persephone went out into the day, the spring, summer, fall,
The world embracing her and rejoicing in her as she did in it.
She spared a thought for Hades, alone in the gloom he preferred,
And came back to her mother at sundown
Almost without regret or resentment. Still,
The thought was a burr under her clothes:
Hades’ stony heart must have broken too
When she left him with only the cold comfort of a promise to return,
However magically binding or divinely arranged.
A thought to soothe the itch: she would make it up to him.
Persephone soaked up the sun and the scent of growing things,
And when leaves fell and wheat stalks withered in the fields,
She would fly home. Now, when she entered a room,
The glow which emanated from her presence was a dark one,
Next to her mother’s and the other gods’ pure splendor.
She’d taken a piece of Hades with her. “I knew you’d be a handful
The moment I first saw you,” Hades had told her,
Almost smiling, holding out the pomegranate seeds
Cupped in his palm like pearls. She’d let them drop into her hand,
One by one like drops of blood, and popped them in her mouth,
A starburst of juice, sweet and tart, over much too soon,
And smiled. “And you were right,” she’d replied
And held her arms out wide. “Catch me.”