Philip Gross
Visiting Persephone
Can you picture him
going down to see her, fitting in
with the difficult visiting times?
He was her father, after all.
But to enter that dark,
that mould and mouldering, his power
and glory threatening to wink out
like a fused bulb with a pinging whine
would tax a better god than him.
She is yellowish pale this week
with a drained look, no pink
but some fresh scars on her arm,
the others aged to shrivelled plum.
She has keelhauled herself by inches
or been crawling down narrowing
ducts of slime and shale.
Some days she hardly greets him
and her silence is a waiting room
where he sits and is not called for,
feeling younger than she is, learning
to make out the shapes in her gloom.
The gifts he foisted on her leave him dull,
a Souza march come shuffling to a halt
outside the darkened concert hall
where a child’s violin slips on difficult scales
then you open the door and there’s no one.
He gets up to go, go
where? Olympus? That old story.
How could he have imagined he
was Zeus? Or made her Persephone?
He stands accused - of failure
to imagine this at all.
Page(s) 62-63
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