but Demeter didn’t answer.
Because she knew.
Because it was she
who had planted that trickster bud,
conspired with Hades,
explained her daughter’s
favorite haunts, her taste
for exquisite flowers. She even suggested
the drama of a split earth, a black-horsed chariot:
“Persephone always was
a terrible romantic.”
And as the plan was carried out
she arranged herself neatly at Zeus’ palace
so as not to hear the scream, the rage—
birth strings snapping,
the hellish joy of swallowed seeds.
For form, and to maintain some thread between generations,
she grieved
and created winter,
that cold honeymoon
when the earth swallows all seeds at once.
And only a mother knows how winter breaks,
how the body can bury pain so deep
it can reinvent the spring.
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