.ceres

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Harvest rolls round again. We root up the ground, and in the remains,
bury our dead. One day, it’s said, she’ll just stop loving us. Stop giving.
There is a limit to all things. To every word, half-bitten back
in the cheek; to every outstretched reach; to every breath, choked
down. Ceres, the devoted. The sorrowing. Note: the two are remote
yet inseparable. To mother is to hold love in one hand, loss in the other,
and fix them into the bone cradle of your chest, right and left.
It is a savage rite of passage.

So when Ceres steps from cities of corn to streets of crowded houses,
the fields of open mouths seem to glut, swallow her up. She sees
her ruched brown seeds feed those who hunger, not those who need,
and it shakes her to the core. No more the mother of all - just grass.
We see her now through a glass, darkly, as she breaks, face by face. Our traced
smiles sewn stark, child’s eyes swapped for magpies’. Greed is gold.
Love is loss. Her tears flow fertile as she folds, breaks down into the land -
bone in bowel, heart in hand.

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Two poems in as many days? I must be on a roll! See, I wasn't lying about the whole mythology series thing either!

Ceres is described as the Eternal Mother, the Sorrowing Mother, goddess of agriculture, crops, civilisation, and the love a mother bears for her child. She was protectress of women, motherhood, marriage, and her worship involved fertility rites and rites for the dead.

Please do read this in its proper format on my dA page.


More mythology poems:
.diana