Half Lives

Half Lives

According to Wikipedia, Persephone, 

(while perhaps not wholly definitive) the etymology

of your name has been traced to a tongue more ancient than the one the other gods speak,

deriving, some have argued, from a much earlier proto-Greek,

which would make you older than both your mother, Demeter, 

and your father, Zeus, that monstrous sexual predator,

that supreme symbol of toxic masculinity

elevated to divinity.

That said, your conception I imagine as thunderclaps over fields of summer wheat,

far more poetic than how your half-sister, Helen, was conceived,

in a bestial flap of swan-white wings, her mother left forlorn,

your father honking like a clown car’s horn.

And look at the chaos kicked off by these infidelities:

war fleets crisscrossing white wakes on the wine dark sea;

men dying for beauty by the fast boats,

killed by weapons forged from tin and copper mined from here, just down the coast,

(and from different regions of the Mesopotamian Basin),

and, later on, more slaughtered in the parched and burning streets of Ilium,

while you were fated to live half the year in hell among the shadowy dead

with a gloomy husband and his dog with three barking heads.

O! How your half-life mirrors our own,

destined to make our homes

in abandoned tin mines at Geevor, Botallack and Boscean,

eating the crimps of old crowst and the crusts of old crib, unseen,

sensing waves of traffic pouring overhead like black water,

and the further mangling of our tongue and culture,

for six months every year until long-range swells clean the beaches and the shore

of the six months that came before,

and we emerge blinking into shortening days, lengthening light

and deep shadows, a stark emblem of black and white.

Like you, our half-lost names are colonised and written over,

palimpsests of scribbled blur,

and your ancient status as a mighty vegetation deity 

reduced to something about pomegranates and patriarchy,

as we are to picturesqueness, fudge, and pasties

(conveniently forgetting ethnic cleansing and religiously motivated atrocities),

and quaint places with absurd names that even we no longer understand,

Stennack, Carn Kenidjack, Trencrom, Praa Sands,

Kulgyth, Porth Ia, Ventongimps, Praze-an-Beeble,

all underlined in red by Word as if we are not capable

of naming things for ourselves and, as a final torment,

offering ridiculous alternatives the program assumes we must have meant.

So, Persephone,

let’s leave it all behind for now and take the coast path out to Clodgy, 

and look west where the sea is polished bronze,

the great shield of the world everything plays out on,

washed by restless tides of entropy

slowly eroding language, land, and memory,

and let’s stand on the cliffs of Zennor, Pendeen and Lannust

and smile as time and tide do their worst,

knowing that, while even these great granite cliffs will someday crumble and give way,

that’s such a long way off, and definitely not today.