Persephone

There Should Be Signs

(x = space)

There Should Be Signs

I open a new page

Place fingers on my eyes

And yawn

There are no coins on

My eyes for Charon

Not yet

Maybe a measure of

Prosperity’s due

So I’ll have something

Of my own to share

To pay my way over Styx

And to the land beyond,

The Grecian Hades

There I could find

Persephone,

If it’s one of her four days

And bid a change

To a new season

Death is a new season, too

I could have as much of

The pomegranate as I like

I was not abducted

And there is

No curse upon me

In fact, life would have

Been taken from me

Talk about abduction

In this case

Of mortality

Sad but without great

Feeling, once we’re there

I’m not sure where

The fires of hell came from,

Whose story

I suppose Elysian fields

Are for the gods

With a sigh, a last release

Of emotion,

I must go another way

C L Couch

Photo by Kovah on Unsplash

Memories in Her Hands

October 22, 2020 0

Taking Turns

Taking Turns

It’s dusk

Dark on a windy winter day

The branches want to articulate,

But they can only screech against the sky

Upon my window

Maybe the trees want to come inside

But better they are where they are,

And I don’t open to their world

To bring the season in,

So we’ll each remain

But for now I’m glad the cold is here

My thanks to Persephone

Whose story rings my mood

The seasons are a find

Who would have thought of them,

Four for temperate climes?

Hers is an old story

And behind all the bittersweet

Action and parable

An older story waits

Untimely resolution

All our chapters realized

C L Couch

CC0 Public Domain

https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1109482

January 9, 2019 0

On the Cusp of a Nor’Easter (prose poem)

On the Cusp of a Nor’Easter
(prose poem)

So my friend calls from Indiana. I tell her of my sister’s new job. I am relieved and happy, because my friend’s been struggling with sufferings that would drive me mad. She sounds well and has a chance to tell me some about her family on her way to church to help lead (in technical matters) a Bible study there. It is cold here. It is colder there (single-digit degrees for many days). When she must ring off, she does. I am at the coffeemaker and place the backside of the phone on a spiral burner on the stovetop (everything turned off). While the coffee’s cooking, I clean out some plastic bottles into which I put tap water to drink throughout the day. Not thinking at first, I place the cleaned-out bottles just outside the burner circle set upon the stove. When I’ve done this four times, I have four empty bottles cornering a phone set on a burner plate of labyrinthine form. I’m sure there is a deity for winter (generally, Persephone, though I’m thinking there’s one for winter only), and have I not built a small, strange contemporary altar to her. A narrow receiver (wireless) offered up inside four plastic monoliths keeping in their stillness their own kind of sentinel watching. Is this supplication? I want my friend to be well. I want her husband to enjoy retirement and her daughter have success at school. I want the cold to move on, over there, though for a Midwest winter season, I guess what is endured is rather normal. (Still too cold.) My temps in southern Pennsylvania still have two digits. But we are called to be ourselves storm-ready against a coming, miles-wide soon-arriving gale. It smacks the South and later rounds out to sea—on the way releasing slivering ice and snow and the season’s other dangers onto our regional metropoles: D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. And in my small town? I pray for navigable roads. In my small place, I pray for electricity’s constancy—that it might faithfully provide sufficient heat in rapport with the thermostat. And now I guess I wait. We wait. I clear the stove and leave on the burner now a single cup, ready for coffee. The empty ceramic vessel a suburban symbol of encouragement and also, I think, of supplication.

January 21, 2016 4