Persephone in the Overworld
They are now at the further
end of the year, those months
when I return to you – months,
others imagine, of darkness.
They don’t know how, when I’m
here in the everyday, I might
yearn for those ghostly passages,
to connect back deeply to you:
You – who dwell, truly, in the realm
of the dead. So I must come to you,
revisiting that now familiar underworld
where those whom we have buried live.
The deep months, when I seem to
withdraw, to disappear, when I am indeed
communing with shadows – they are the
sad anniversaries, the times of ending.
I have adjusted to going back and forth
each year. I do rejoice in the good green
earth, in flowers and the sun. I do
value my living loves, always. And
I watch as they gradually join you
in the tombs of mind and memory ...
New friends arrive. Children and other
young things continue appearing yearly.
It is not unpleasant being here, even
in your absence. Nor is it at all unwelcome
when time spins around again to allow me
to linger once more in your reality, Love.
The NaPoWriMo prompt: write a poem in which the speaker is identified with, or compared to, a character from myth or legend.
The Poem A Day prompt: Write a The End poem and/or write a Beginning poem.
The subtitle makes it clear I'm identifying with Persephone. The difference is that I've had two great loves in my life, both now dead. They died many years apart, but the anniversaries of those deaths are very close. I am wondering if the poem works, with this variation from the Persephone story. Also, at the end I capitalised Love, to create some ambiguity as to whom I was addressing, perhaps Love itself, and I also wonder if that works.
This is also an appropriate piece to have written on the date of Samhain here in the Southern Hemisphere: the time when the veil grows thin between the living and the dead, a time to remember and honour our dear departed.