Call Back Your Nymphs and Swallows

a poem-tale for Artemis, on the spring equinox

Spring fresco from Akrotiri. Part of the Room D1 from Akrotiri, 17th century BCE, National Archaeological Museum of Athens

CALL BACK YOUR NYMPHS & SWALLOWS

a poem-tale for Artemis

(scroll down to the end for audio recording)

1.

Every day of March from first to spring I have walked 
through red fields of poppies in my heart.
Red poppies grow from battlefields, they say.
Red poppies grow among the wheat on the island
where Persephone was taken from Demeter,
a wise woman once told me.
I wade through them
taking sheafs of red into my arms
breaking the petals into my skirt with a little knife
or with my fingernails, until there is no more red
and I am in the dark place, the bee dark,
where almost no words can live.

Queens move here by subtle
emanations and vibrations, all scent and sound.
I have not their fluency or their sight
and so I am in the long inner night
where Regulus and Spica burn
and the hive hums its intentions,
its sexuality, its swarms
into the wordless equinox.

Beneath me the earth hums in much the same way
and in me also something hums like this
and wants to become a blue swallow