BIRTHING APRIL

PRIMAVERA, tempera on wood, Sandro Botticelli, c. 1477–82
courtesy Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

“Mars [Ares] also you may not know was formed by my arts.”
                                       -Ovid, Fasti  (5.229ff trans. Boyle)

FLORA'S STORY

one kiss thy arts will bring by name you him
and tell us how you fill thy garden trim

©2015 Manum Inicere stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

#ohjDailyWords #mythopoetics #2lines #vss #micropoetry


notes

1. Manum inicere literally translates to put a hand into or onto something. For more on this term, intertextuality in ars poetica and more see Charles Burrough’s “Talking With Goddesses: Ovid’s Fasti and Boticelli’s Primavera in Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal and Visual Inquiry http://www.academia.edu/1590773/_Talking_with_goddesses_Ovid_s_Fasti_and_Botticelli_s_Primavera._
2. For Ovid’s telling of the myth of Chlôris/Flora see Ovid, Fasti 5. 193 ff (trans.Boyle) the myth is as follows:

"The goddess [Flora] replied to my questions, as she talks, her lips breathe spring roses: ‘I was Chloris, whom am now called Flora. Latin speech corrupted a Greek letter of my name. I was Chloris, Nympha of the happy fields [Elysion], the homes of the blessed (you hear) in earlier times. To describe my beauty would mar my modesty: it found my mother a son-in law god. It was spring, I wandered; Zephyrus (the West Wind) saw me, I left. He pursues, I run: he was the stronger; and Boreas gave his brother full rights of rape by robbing Erechtheus' house of its prize [Oreithyia]. But he makes good the rape by naming me his bride, and I have no complaints about my marriage.

‘I enjoy perpetual spring: the year always shines, trees are leafing, the soild always fodders. I have a fruitful garden in my dowered fields, fanned by breezes, fed by limpid fountains. My husband filled it with well-bred flowers, saying: "Have jurisdiction of the flower, goddess." I often wanted to number the colours displayed, but could not: their abundance defied measure.

‘As soon as the dewy frost is cast from the leaves and sunbeams warm the dappled blossom, the Horae (Seasons) assemble, hitch up their coloured dresses and collect these gifts of mine in light tubs. Suddenly the Charites (Graces) burst in, and weave chaplets and crowns to entwine the hair of gods. I first scattered new seed across countless nations; earth was formerly a single colour. I first made a flower from Therapnean blood [Hyakinthos the hyacinth], and its petal still inscribes the lament. You, too, narcissus, have a name in tended gardens, unhappy in your undivided self. Why mention Crocus, Attis or Cinyras' son, from whose wounds I made a tribute soar?’"


http://www.theoi.com/Nymphe/NympheKhloris.html

SEMELE-STIMULA

Bernard Picart,1731
photo credit: wiki

IN REMARKABLE DEATH

None can look upon the face of god and live
              ~ Dante, Paradiso, canto twenty-one


In a temerity bequeathed her
you inherit corn spirit.

Let her wisdom precede you―Go!
Find your father.


©2015 Endless Pleasure stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords #ohj #vss #micropoetry #mythopoetics


notes

1. For depictions of Semele in mythology and in art see Mythography which notes the following:  1.The name, “Semele” is not native to Greek language.  2. Although “there is some controversy about the precise origin of this legendary figure, one thing about Semele is certain - her story….quite popular in Greek myth.” It is a tale of remarkable death.
2. For Semele/Stimula see http://www.mythologydictionary.com/semele-mythology.html  for a scant synopsis of the myth. See also Ovid, “Fasti” trans. Anne Wiseman p. 118 for the ‘stimulae’ (Stimula) version of the myth.
3. Dante uses the myth to warn against temerity when approaching the sacred. See notes for canto twenty-one p 459 of Anthony Esolen’s “Paradise” translation. But also, Dante understands one must approach.
4. To experience the historical soul of indigenous peoples now telling their own narratives about a time of great upheaval that causes the archetypal activism of this feminine principle in the form of images of Selu, the corn maiden or first woman/mother of Cherokee polis to erupt in the visions and dreams of  19thC Cherokee people, visit http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/564

5. Handel’s “Semele”

TUESDAY POETRY "Nykteris"

Nykteris

“… from dusk they take their name, and flit by night" ~Ovid*

From dusk, the hour, stolen stole
a means by which a shape is lost & hid
Phersephassa** stolen, too, once green
and new and hid from light
now everything awakens to the flight

a voice begins as if in wings
tiny sounds in parchment stir and sting
tiny-sized and Hermes-seized declare
the time is now to climb and ride the air
they fashion what a shape in loss returns
dusk, the hour, stolen, stolen bright
and everything awakens to the night 

©2013 “Nykteris” stephanie pope mythopoetry.com


notes

 *Ovid, “Metamorphoses” 4. 422 ff
 **Perse’phone, a goddess giving  meaning a subtle manner
(http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0104:entry=persephone-bio-1)
(Περσεφόνη), in Latin Proserpina, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. (Hom. Il. 14.326, Od. 11.216; Hes. Theog. 912, &c. ; Apollod. 1.5.1.) Her name is commonly derived from φερειν φόνον, "to bring" or "cause death," and the form Persephone occurs first in Hesiod (Hes. Th. 913; comp. Horn. Hymm. in Cer. 56), the Homeric form being Persephoneia. But besides these forms of the name, we also find Persephassa, Phersephassa, Persephatta, Phersephatta. Pherrephassa, Pherephatta, and Phersephoneia, for which various etymologies have been proposed. The Latin Proserpina, which is probably only a corruption of the Greek, was erroneously derived by the Romans from proscrpere,"to shoot forth." (Cic. de Nat. Deor. 2.26.) Being the infernal goddess of death, she is also called a daughter of Zeus and Styx (Apollod. 1.3.1 ); in Arcadia she was worshipped under the name of Despoena, and was called a daughter of Poseidon, Hippius, and Demeter, and said to have been brought up by the Titan Anytus. (Paus. 8.37.3, 6, 25.5.) Homer describes her as the wife of llades, and the formidable, venerable, and majestic queen of the Shades, who exercises her power, and carries into effect the curses of men upon the souls of the dead, along with her husband. (Hom. Od. 10.494, 11.226, 385, (134, Il. 9.457, 569; comp. Apollod. 1.9.15.) Hence she is called by later writers Juno Inferna, Auerna, and Stygia (Verg. A. 6.138; Ov. Met. 14.114), and the Erinnyes are said to have been daughters of her by Pluto. (Orph. Hymn. 29. 6, 6, 70. 3.) Groves sacred to her are said by Homer to be in the western extremity of the earth, on the frontiers of the lower world, which is itself called the house of Persephone. (Od. 10.491, 509.)

DAILY POEM Turning Sandy In The Desert of the Real

 

 Fabricating Altercations & Pinking Shears ( )

He stopped writing her when he fell in love with another; love is big fabric.She suffered a kind of falling out; this to its own space poetic silence shored in, spilt; rusting trust; lovers, eX-ed. Pink is the milkmaid’s drowned sunset, ragged the shoreline…

nothing carries the weight of such sheared stain. Where sunset split formless and sublunary“nesses” a wine-darkened, moon-lit emptiness everywhere and nowhere, does it not still?

In sheared space―( ), she cradles Acis…

a fluid, intricate evasion invasive in as-form― her private place

pink pitcher pitched parenthetically O…
will have embodied his image-remainder, poetic lovers parting

by external altercation ―( ). Her blood-milk waxes the infant slant through a woman within, without

and love divides in the interval called woman
pinking her lower down. She will always be two…

And as if she were another, a woman stoppered, Galatea opens through desire the unstoppered

disturbance within the same undead nature. And she tends it dearly. Space rains within, disturbed

and without, disturbed. This imparts a great swirl watering the living girl with the underground nature

love wets the dry… the sole… ensouls; a psyche’s psyche begets itself a second time, underground.

A frayed but unafraid soul ensouls because something big will have happened to someone’s looking

―within and around, from within and, without; from time into time.

A woman falls out of every girling pierced by night formations where the sun-eyed ate
maids-a-milking. Now psyche’s lover carries this very big pink disposition, beatitudes, each, outed
in... for which to reposition dissed positions made after maiden milk poetizes love. Pink Psyche

is a match for that divinity…the formless, sublunary-sensed “nesses”

where gods work away & DIS

appear in the as-form within, without.

The sheared, pinking woman without will bi-focus perspective’s “space” within its own space

as if ‘woman’ falls back upon a landscape edging her edges saw-notched

in maiden gone-nesses, the god

appearing in the space of her having fallen… open…. The realm under her

is her. She is expecting… difference… perhaps, shaded in something even more ”pinked”; something

in the here-to-for unknown great expanse under renovation opening the darkness , something

sheared, under new management, having itself fallen open in the pinked space golder than gold

pinking sheers…. She is like a woman falling totally O; O as in a mariage blanc-ode

a bigger begetting in the trusted rust of lovers eX-ed starlit and ( ).

©2012 mythopoetry.com stephanie pope  Fabricating Altercations & Pinking Shears



  
 

HERA'S EYES



                                                1963 etching by Salvador Dali
First published in "Like A Woman Falling" ©2004, the following poem, inspired by a dream, is based upon the myth of IO as told by Ovid in "Metamorphoses".

IN A DREAM SHE LAY STILL

inside what she couldn't see one thousand eyed in two or three

the egg hatched when the eagle maid

in black, remade in gold...

Last night She dreamt an alchemy, She dreamt

neither me nor mine. She dreamt

herself and when that died

She left her eyes behind. He said

This forest burns

burns high in the heavens, see

every tree is blackened

to its tips. He said

Pick that up

and so, someone leaned over the edge and reached

high in the heavens low

and picked from the tallest tips of the blackened pines

someone looking just like me pitched out

and thus drew in two boughs, two boughs, both dead

one black, one gold, one ash and one

whose blossoming did hold. They are dead

someone looking just like me then said.

He said, "Separate them!" And, I did, while he went on

and on and on―an on-to-say, a story. The fires de-story

everything tis true, as this fire, this terrific fire did you

but look what you now hold. Downwardlooking

I lifted two boughs, both were dead

once.

He said

Separation changes things. Now that you know this
you will, too. Now you must get away quickly...

(is this a quickening a-go?) Go!

Get away with this saying-thing! And so

I jumped into a heap between two gents

a father and a son. What a mess!

that leap, this heap, these men

the son was driving

(too close to the edge)

the father's face kept changing―he had three!

(none of which I liked) but, that

didn't stop me from interacting

and all the while we were climbing.

And, we kept climbing, up a slippery slope

conforming to its curl, the dash tilting such

that water kept flowing toward us while curving

to the dash. The son was driving

on the outside where the three of us sat...

and the cab began leaking...from the in-side out.

Everything's a mess, I thought, yet,

is adhering so. The boy

reached out and slurped a sliding slip of a sip

from the dash. It was a mad dash! Such a bad water

a mad-lad, sad-bad water!

Turns out dad hauls manure.

(It was his truck the boy was driving.)

"Are you sure he knows how," I asked

just as we parked.

I got out as quick as I could

parked like we were on that iffy cliff

cleft with crevices and rocks and a high house

built upon stone. Some folks were home

a girlfriend I knew came out

we rushed into each other's arms

and each other's laughter. Oh, the things

you have been saying, she said.

I know. Don't you love it, the things I say?

They want to know how on earth

you do it, get away with that say. They want

to learn those sayings, too. I said

Oh, that is simple

then I showed them all. You let IT

form the picture. You let IT do the work.

Let it as IT, and IT will let you.

It opened then in the work they were

working on them. All the right colors bled, too

in the one I drew, which I used in example

I let the paint do its own painting, I said.

Then we watched and we saw that the paint did.

IT showed up and showed through and showed

quite a show―My! All those eyes!

Which formed into forms that died dry

in a day scene. But, just before they did...

in the center of the seen a black thing formed

and it began to grow

and this black thing formed into a bird

a bird in flight rising from a

red, red sorry sort of spot

surrounded in a circularity of gold

from where it hatched.

Seems eggs hatch when we

return a story.

And so, no body's sorry

about jumping into that

truckload of sh-sh...stuff

nor about exposing people

to all those black things bleeding

through their own red-dead, dead red

sorry messes

nor about

messin' with those guys...even though

(somebody still thinks that driver needs lessons)


Hera's Eyes, stephanie pope from  "Like A Woman Falling" ©2004