Poetry! (Mythic Verse, Vol. 1)
Table of Contents
Status "The Polyhymnia Conspiracy" "Hard Times" "The Seventh Seed" "Ancient Wisdom" "Encounter the Dragon" "The Lame God Can Barely Stand" "The Gender-Fluid Seer" "Be a Deer" "Kvasir's Guide to the Galaxy" "The Pella Curse Tablet" "Goddess of the Lockdown" "Xanthus" Copyright"The Seventh Seed"
"Rise and approach,"
says the young queen.
I hesitate.
With my eyes closed,
the herdsman's wrinkled old face
appears
before me
just as it had been,
when lit by the harvest bonfire,
when his resonant voice
had risen
and dipped
and wound
through the landscape
of his words.
I see my brother's face, too,
attentive to the story
that would consume his soul...
Of the daughter of all-nourishing Demeter,
at play in the meadow
in one moment,
and in the next,
hauled,
kicking and wailing,
through the maw of a new-formed cave.
Of the sunless realm of Lord Haides.
Of the six swallowed seeds.
Of the ruling of Zeus.
Then,
from the story's aftermath,
when the herdsman
had steered his song from the wheel ruts
of a thousand retellings,
my squinted eyes recall
every line of the man's brow
as he drew us
into his conspiracy.
"The maiden kept a seventh seed,"
he'd said,
"with the power
to turn
the wintery seasons
of Demeter's grief
into a Stygian darkness
that could
shrivel forests and fields,
frost the grasslands,
and spread an ice
that would
never
again
know
springtime."
These fire-bright memories
burn
my inner sight,
leaving behind a darkness
as deep
as the shadows
of a nighttime farmhouse.
I hear my brother's excited whisper again
just as it had wormed its way
through the wall
between our bedchambers.
"Pyrrha,
you and I
must quest for that seed."
"You would destroy the world?"
I'd asked.
"I never would,"
Lykomedes had laughed.
"I'd just like to know
that I could."
I open my eyes,
and rise,
never so alone as now,
to approach
the Queen of the Dead.
Greg R. Fishbone
July 2020
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