*
Lately your face has darkened.
I’ve watched you leave the room
like Persephone must have left,
on the flaming black horse of the dead.
They say that every year,
Persephone escapes the underworld,
Demeter relents from frigidity,
and the Earth has some consolation.
But what if remembered sunlight
caused her no pang of desire,
and the realm of the shadowy dead
began to feel like a home?
Would she dread her next look at the sky
as a prelude to another time forsaken?
Hades would need no deceptions then.
Persephone would count herself lost,
rather than lose the world again.
She would settle in her chair,
take another pomegranate seed
and chew it slowly.
I couldn’t dispel this thought,
so I kept this photograph
to remind me,
that when Persephone is cold,
from her seasons with the dead,
she can’t forget entirely,
that the sun is still traveling the sky
waiting to warm the Earth
once she emerges.
-Brent Allard
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