More than Wheat

What if I harvest more than wheat?

Does that make me an unruly goddess,

wild as my daughter, who prefers

languishing in the underworld with pomegranate juice dripping from her face, stealing kisses to temper the god of death

to making the flowers bloom? She’s become stingy with nectar,

now that she’s tasted it. But everyone

adores her, half in love with her

ascending, half lusting for her

obscene descent into pleasure,

building fires, admiring the coals

glowing like molten rubies, sparkling

orange embers and dancing yellow flames, woodsmoke in the air, bodies coming together beneath quilts.

She thinks she’s grown, my petulant daughter who luxuriates in velvet petals, honeyed nectar, and juicy pomegranates, delights in tales of judgment, of the fires down below. She thinks she’s shocking me, me—her mother who harvested her from Zeus’s raging seed.

Perhaps I would like some time back;

maybe I would like to harvest

the time I wasted crying for a girl who wasn’t abducted, who sought the dark night and a different sort of fire. Can I harvest a summer afternoon or a spring evening? The scent of wet cedar bark with oak leaves clinging to it in the rain, or maybe a single shaft of sunlight falling like honey on the jeweled leaves of autumn, fairy rings dancing the fallen leaves into circles ascending from the ground, magic thick in the wind.

The field workers trudge home in the crisp twilight, their hands bleeding and empty stomachs screaming ravenously at a moon hanging too low and bright to justify rest, as if the fickle moon can justify anything save the tide.

While you gaze adoringly at the harvest moon, writing songs and poetry about golden and silver light, remember what it costs, that I must cease my fruitful work and find a way to occupy myself through these dark, desolate, frigid nights. Wheat, indeed.