The Opera of Persephone

Reading Note: For a better reading experience, it is suggested to first read a brief summary online about the mythical story of Persephone.

The story of Persephone's abduction to the Underworld is most famously told in the Homeric "Hymn to Demeter".

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Persephone-Greek-goddess

Authors Note: Hello, and thank you for taking the time to read this poem. If you are reading this on a phone, the spacing may be slightly distorted.

The Opera of Persephone is the third instalment of a five-part series which discusses the lives of famous mythological women. The second installment, "The Three Deaths of Eurydice", is also available to read on The Stand.

Thank you, wonderful reader, and I hope you enjoy.

The Opera of Persephone

Overture in the Vale of Nysa

Listen- you can hear the harsh rattling of the cage, the fingers hitting the bars,

my body has betrayed me and grown this ivory dungeon,

it has hidden me in a web of marrow and flesh and blood.

My soul is begging to leave my skeleton, clawing at its cage like an animal,

you have caught me, and you hang me to be skinned.

As I escape my humanity,

I shall ask my fugitive soul to bind itself to this Earth,

to sew itself into the greenery, threading their lives to mine.

I wish to watch my human flesh and bones be devoured by the rain,

to watch the greenery worship me, to see the moss grow around me until I am

suffocated with life.

Finally, to die as a diety.

You need not bury me, for I will gracefully sink into the soil,

and let the roots of the tall grass whisper against my face.

I have not risen,

I choose instead to find my friends in the trenches of this earth,

where everything must live because it cannot bear to die.

I linger, but soon-

I will be swallowed into darkness.

Aria for the Underworld

I can hear the scrape of the wheels

from deep below Elysium.

Kore dies when the chariot approaches,

I am polluted when the stallions’ hooves dig me free.

They look to me with wild eyes

and earthly barbarity,

they pray the fates will untangle them from their harnesses,

and free them from their master of death.

There are small mercies in the Underworld-

There is darkness, but there is warmth in the moonlight.

Life lingers here, clawing its way across the silver Styx,

swearing itself to the death river,

just to see what was once theirs.

The queen of life is burdened to rule over what cannot live.

Hecate save me,

cover my skin in your pentagrams,

draw a line of salt around where I stand.

I wish to be made out of wishbones,

to be snapped in my own favour,

my divine body broken by everlasting life.

I bask in the cold months,

when death descends on Earth,

when I am free to wander the end of the world.

I linger, but soon-

It is time for me to rise.

Finale for the Death Goddess

Drench the soil above me with saltwater,

so that I may emerge into the land of life as Aphrodite did,

naked, weeping, and beautiful.

I have fallen to my knees before life,

I let Earth’s greedy plants wind around my limbs

and grow from my new skin,

their roots desperate for a taste of divine death.

They dig further, exposing my pomegranate blood,

curving their way through my insides,

I find the tendons of my heart between their teeth.

The earth does not cradle me as it once did,

It worships the maiden, but I am a maiden no longer,

Kore is dead, she does not live in this skin,

her body remains in the human lands.

Go and see where the moss buried her,

where she was washed away by the forest waters.

I have been forged into who I am by the Underworld.

I have been baptized in the River Styx,

I have risen above the current of the Acheron and

sprinkled Lethe water on my human soul.

The orchestra has arrived for my finale-

It has lifted me from my hands and my knees,

it has winded me through the currents of its song

and twisted my spine free from child’s pose.

My bare feet burn the earthly land I walk upon,

mint plants withering under my heel.

I linger here, but soon-

I must claim my new name, Persephone

I am a daughter, a deity,

but first, I was a woman.