Gods in Suburbia: Persephone

When she considered your name

Emily, or Anne, or Lily

swelling with your burgeoning body

with powdered fantasies

lacy anticipation, rose dreams

if she had known this sacred name

would one day be coupled with dread, with disorder

that people would sigh as they mentioned it

with a withering pity, a resignation

implying a lost cause

that those vegetal dreams, dreams of translucent skin

of dripping breasts and small animals crying in the night

might be premonitory of her daughter’s fate?

When she first clothed your tiny limbs in cotton

dressed your form in perfumed cloth

swaddled you in a white blanket

knitted with a grandmother’s adoration

could she have known that this person the name would become

would someday loathe you?

Speak words of spite? Curse your name?

When she washed your impish body

slight and dark and smelling of warm milk

and the sweetest sweat

or blue-eyed and pale as a magnolia blossom

if she had known that this was the body

she would someday rescue

half-starved, self-mutilated, injected with chemicals

from an asylum in some foreign land?

From the devil's embrace in the underground abyss?

That this infant face, the face of love

with eyes deep gems

would one day be the face of a ruined woman

drained of spirit and of the will to live

that she would collect you in pieces,

scattered like trash on a windy day:

a plastic bag tangled in tree limbs in an urban wasteland

a grime-covered coin on a city sidewalk

or picked through like rotting pomegranate seeds?

That these eyes sparkling with future life

would one day be the eyes of the dead?

That the life she labored to bring into this world

and meticulously rocked, and nursed, and washed

and comforted, and read to, and schooled

made grow with her hopes into a new person

would someday come to this?

How easy and natural is our love for the baby

pure of mind, unspoiled and unspoken.

How can we love the stranger she becomes?