Pat Seman
Persephone
Grass in the meadow hip-high, scattered with wild flowers,
she’s gathering armfuls of them: iris, hyacinth and the pale
narcissus, its scent so sweet and heady it overpowers.
A trembling,
a violent heave,
the earth under her feet
falls
away,
she’s snatched
dragged down, nothing
beneath her but a rushing darkness.
Can she still hear us, the trees whisper as their roots
push through crumbling earth to hard rock,
voices reach her flitting
through hollow chambers and twisting corridors,
arrive as a distant memory, faint
echoes
of the world above,
where the mother
roams in anguish, her despair
a scourge that withers every green thing,
stripping the earth bare.
But Persephone knows now what she wants,
six pomegranate seeds,
jewel-like, glistening,
plump with juice.
She picks them one by one from his proffered palm,
each on her tongue
an explosion.
Light courses
through her darkness,
she’s rooted,
electric with knowledge.
The seed is sown.