| Annette Hyder |
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Demeter's
Soliloquy: Winter as an
Expression of Love My smiting sorrow, snow raped of promise, icicles stiff like limbs in final freeze, howling harridan winds set free to shriek and curse, might seem to have been borrowed from some other deity, perhaps Norse Thor whose thewsome hewing fits him like his scowl, habitually. Or perhaps my sib Poseidon whose trident gives signal of his three moods: incensed, furious and foremost, angry. This excess of hardening brought to bear on withered land, this malevolence shaken in crystalline form like salt over witches' brew, falls short cannot begin to encompass or express my mother's love rampaging in garments of grief; the sackcloth of emptiness, ashes of impotence I fist-throw on barren land. My love has curled itself into a claw ready to rip every shred of beauty left on earth because such beauty mocks my loss makes light the tumescent lack of my Persephone. And this is all meagerly sufficient. I am left wanting. My rebirth, realized through the fulfillment of promise in my daughter, has been seized. I, a goddess, do not speak merely of genetic rebirth inherent in reproduction. Our children are us, refined and sublimated. And thus we love them better than ourselves and better than the world which merely seems the frame to take our hammer to should that frame contain within it our child loss. "A mother is forever a cellular chimera, a blend of the body she was born with and all of the bodies she has borne." -Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier |
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