Crazy take on Demeter

A crazy person's take on Demeter:


DEMETER

Fear not the heat of the sun
As you turn your back to shadow,
And find a fiercer brand
Upon your brow
Than any night or curmudgeon shade
Could possibly avow.

The world has feral brevity
To mark its face;
A panther’s footprint
The strange allure
Of finding death much deader
Than it ever was before.

But you have borne a shadow
By turning your face to Apollo,
Ripped from womb
The blond canal
That made its voice grow silent
Makes it still grow tonal.

And you listen for a cry
To tune your currents to Simois;
For a tired Andromache
Lost beyond the world
Weeping in needle point rivers
With currents yet unfurled.

There’s nothing you can give
Not to negate her death;
But to pretend she lives
Just this little shadow
Fussing upon your breast
You feed it to the gallows.

You give it to the sun
This little brand you birthed;
Still to find what brands her face
A light where shadow has no place
To run its fatal glory
Makes you her murderer.


.
There's so much that can be said of shadow. It really is what the sun brands upon us. When I wrote this poem, tonight, I wanted to figure Demeter not just as a sad sobering mother. But as a woman implicating herself in the murder of her daughter (Persepone).

The last stanza, you give it to the sun... makes you her murderer, is significant in the logic of my unhinged mind for one reason. It attempts to warrant Demeter's insanity, waiting half the year for her daughter's return. The poem is meant to be Demeter thinking to herself, believe it or not. And I suppose, she feels she is the murderer because she sacrifices what brands her (Demeter) in order to see a place where there are no shadows, her daughter's artless face. Only to realize, this would be murder, because her daughter has inexorably changed. PERSEPOHE has been murdered, already, you see. A part of her is murdered each year, re-creating a succession of counterfeits, much like the seasons, when leaves wither and are re-created, for example...

It's meant, despite being horrid, to implicate the fulfillment of fantasy in the murder of dreams.

And, as I am feeling quite horrid, quite sick, I best be off...

Pulchrum Est Paucorum Hominum!