Hope

Six pomegranate seeds.

That’s all it took.

The things we don’t know when we finally give in. If only we did.

‘Persephone’. A rich, sylvan name. Fecund. Sylph-like. We try out these syllables on our tongues, tasting the fruit that dooms us to a cold dark world at least half the time.

‘Demeter’ altogether more real, determined, sharp somehow. It is her will that won’t be bent. She doesn’t eat—no hidden, forbidden fruit for her. She doesn’t sleep, dream, hope, relent until that which is hers is hers again. What is it to be a mother who yearns for what she will never keep? For that which was never hers to begin with?

And where do we begin?

With the gathering of flowers. Hyacinth, Narcissus, Anemone. Mythical names. A mythical girl who somehow stands in for all of us who are lost and who yearn for our mothers.

I miss her.

And the dark shadow lurks. Spectre. Lord of ghosts. Thief.

He rends the earth. Splits it in two. Swallows a whole life whole. Makes it his. But not wholly. Because six pomegranate seeds were not twelve. No disciples here then.

I miss her.

This is what everything means to me.

The vanishing point. That’s where Demeter roams. Wild hair, ravaged face. Tears that drip drip drip without awareness. It’s her body that is ripped in two. Always two. Her fate.

The gods think her grief is intolerable, failing all the while to notice that it is her grief. Others are stake apparently. The world pivots on a mother’s love apparently. Is Demeter still a mother? Her daughter gone. Hope is gone. She’s gone. Is Demeter a mother? A compromise must be reached for the sake of the other.

Persephone in her prison grieves too.
Perfect symmetry. If they could both but know it, maybe there would be some small comfort in a mourning that is shared.

But no.

Burning for comfort. Refusing comfort. There is none to be had.

The storytellers don’t notice her grief. Because it’s still, frozen, disbelieving.

Because of six pomegranate seeds. They mark six moments of (in)decision. Irrevocable. The law you see. There is a law that says No. The law. Of the name. Of the Father. Non. Nom. None. Not one. A compromise is always a decision.

She eats the seeds without thinking. Why don’t the poets see that that is the point? She does not know. She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know that in saying yes she was yielding to the big No. The big zero. The vanishing point. That vanishing now marks the hours, the days, the minutes. Marks all of our time.

She returns from time to time. In dreams. It makes her want to die without death and without killing. To die up against her mother. To place her head on her shoulder, enter into her chest and double-lock herself in.

Instead, the back and forth. The interminable wandering. The dark, the light both flooding through her. Mostly in the dark. She never saw the light. Never sees it.

I miss her.