“THE FALL” & “THE MARGINALIZED” : “THE LIMBO OF PATRIARCHS” (or) REVISITING THE UNDERWORLD OF THE TA KATÔTATA #poetrymonth

LIVE LIKE A WOMAN FALLING BUT…

“The ultimate state of love is freedom, absolute freedom, and any relationship that destroys freedom is not worthwhile. Love is a sacred art. To be in love is to be in a holy relationship.”  ~osho  
  

when falling, let fall at least twice
letting things fall apart and then
fall between their interstice;

in descensus
harrow the realm of the dead
not the damned and thus

shall you go
raising the bar
ever low

©2016 Undoing Limbo stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

#poetrymonth #amwriting #vss

notes

limbo
lim·bo [ lim-boh]
NOUN [PLURAL LIM·BOS.]

HISTORY
Limbo came into usuage between 1300-50 a.d.; Middle English, from Medieval Latin phrase in limbō on hell's border ( Latin: on the edge), equivalent to in on + limbō, ablative
of limbus edge, border (L), place bordering on hell (ML)

1.

(often initial capital letter) Roman Catholic Theology. a region on the border of hell or heaven, serving as the abode after death of unbaptized infants (limbo of infants) and of the righteous who died before the coming of Christ (limbo of the fathers or limbo of the patriarchs)

2.

a place or state of oblivion to which persons or things are regarded as being relegated when cast aside, forgotten, past, or out of date: My youthful hopes are in the limbo of lost dreams.

3.

an intermediate, transitional, or midway state or place.

4.

a place or state of imprisonment or confinement.  http://www.dictionary.com/browse/limbo

MYTHOLOGY
            For the Christian descensus ad inferos, myth of limbo see “the harrowing of hell”.


DANCE

            “The limbo is a dance in which participants have to cross under a stick by bending backward at the waist. The stick is lowered a notch each time every one passes under it, and those who touch the stick are eliminated from the dance. … The version of the limbo performed in nineteenth century Trinidad was meant to symbolize slaves entering the galleys of a slave ship, or a spirit crossing over into the afterworld, or “limbo.” See West Indian Julia Edwards

“Traditionally, the limbo dance began at the lowest possible bar height and the bar was gradually raised, signifying an emergence from death into life.”  WIKI

                                                                  ***********


1. The Ta Katôtata, the lowest (spirits of the dead) marginalized or cast aside but who nonetheless bring their liveliness to our mythic imagination. The Ta Katôtata are located along a threshold (to the underworld) in an imaginal space designated limbo. Limbo might simply reference a “yod” or “three way crossing.”

#BENEATH : A Poetheme

BENEATH A POETHEME
"The logics that create the surface of the story
          are never the story." -Maggie Macary

I.

A root formation
you

Old Moon, and I
beneath you

Being of the one dream
a creature of creation, too


II

Old Moon
a hidden thrust in core and crust

Beneath you
freezing and thawing

Has begun
in trees to run


III.

Old Moon
dreaming in that language,

Piñon 
pine

Beneath you,
something new


IV.

Sore
piñon pine

Sings
crow

Your deep stone rhythm
pocks my breast

Repeats
beneath my rest Old Moon                  

  ©2016 Root Formation stephaniepope mythopoetry.com



notes
1. The introduction to "March Moon" ( to read the full essay see http://www.mythopoetry.com/mythopoetics/essay_moon_mar.html )

For The Love of a Woman

by stephanie pope published 03/13/09 Pt 3 March Moon A Cite For Sore Eyes After a while, one starts thinking in that language, dreaming in that language, as well as speaking in that language, and the behavior becomes different.  --J. J. Jameson

These essays around the full moon are inspired by a thought whose soul wonders what it is to reflect the mind of winter. Seeing the moon one gentle evening, this thinking began to imagine the moon had seen a good portion of the ghost world of what came and went many times over throughout countless eons long past. Thereupon perhaps something might remain in these ‘other world’ remains winter minds still and this might be of value and import to us now in our own life resolve. Whereupon our world, too, in the way it remains predisposed to reflect such mythic thoughts always and once more and imaginally so, we might then begin again to share the soul of this world with each other, being of the one dream and begun from within creative life’s image and likeness creatures of creation too. So this now is the imaginal route retraced that brings to me in contemplation likenesses for the ‘mind of winter’ and bears these through the first to this last of the winter-moon essays for this series.

2. "The logics that create the surface of the story are never the story." -Maggie Macary, "Cultural Mythology, A Methodology

POETIC AUTHORS / In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about becoming an author.

AUTHORING THE SONG OF LIFE

ΕἰςτέττιγαΜακαρίζομένσε, τέττιξ,
ὅτιδενδρέωνἐπ΄ἄκρωνὀλίγηνδρόσονπεπωκώς,
βασιλεὺςὅπως, ἀείδειs (Ανακρέων)[i]

victory symbol this
cicada's chirping song

©2015 Forever Young stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

---

[i] “We call you happy, oh Cicada, because after you have drunk a little dew in the treetops you sing like a queen.” WEST, M. (1986). Carmina Anacreonta. Leipzig: Teubner.#6words #amwriting #writers #blog #poetry #mpy #2lines #mythopoetics #vss

Writer’s Prompt: In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about becoming an author. #6words #amwriting #writers
Prompt Source: @kelsye

notes

1. Cicada. Order, hemipteran and suborder, Auchenorrhyncha, in the superfamily, Cicadoidea. In Latin, “cicada” means “tree cricket”. When they start buzzing in late July and August there is about 6 more weeks till frost legend has it.  In Greek, “cicada” is called “tettix” with modern Greek calling it “tzitzikas”. Both words are fun metrics in writing.

2. In a scholar’s paper Anastasia Georgaki provides a number of interesting research ideas such as 

a) “The earliest explicit reference on the cicada singing, comes from Homer in the Illiad with the adjective leirios (like the flower 'lily') where Homer describes the 'shrilling voices' of the elder men, likened to Cicada song 'lily-like', after their city has been besieged. Hesiod's reference underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ) and Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine).”

~see Anastasia Georgaki Listening to the Cicada Chorus in the Plato Academy: soundscape research

b)  Hesiod’s reference (Hesiod Works 582 ff. : “τέττιξδενδρέῳἐφεζόμενοςλιγυρὴνκαταχεύετ̓ἀοιδὴνιπυκνὸνὑπὸπτερύγων, θέρεος” “καματώδεοςὥρῃ) underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ)

c) Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine); “We call you happy, oh Cicada, because after you have drunk a little dew in the treetops you sing like a queen.”

d) Georgaki mentions two important myths with regards the cicada. One is the myth of Eunomos. Eunomos is a citharode, a poet who composes his poetry upon the stringed instrument, the cithara, a kind of lyre. The myth says there is a contest between Ariston of Rhegion and Eunomos of Lokri, which takes place in Delphi. During the contest a string breaks on the lyre of Eunomos and a cicada jumps up to fill the role and supply the missing note. The poet-singer adapts his music to that of his accomplice’s missing note and this move(ment) wins the contest. This odd thing happens along the Halex River marking the boundary between two regions, Rhegion and Lokri. The river passes through a deep ravine. The cicadas on the Lokri side of the bank sing, the cicadas on the Rhegion side do not. This tale is taken up again by a Christian revisionist, Clement of Alexandria, who retells the story another way, one, Roger Lipsey in Have You Been to Delphi? in a section called ‘A Chapter of Tales” says  Clement works with at great length to alter in accent the miraculous kinship bond the poet has with nature through cicadian rhythm. For more about this turn in the Christian theological imagination see Have You Been to Delphi?: Tales of the Ancient Oracle for Modern Minds, New York: Suny Series New York Press, 2001 pp116-117.

The second cicada myth Georgaki mentions is the myth of Tithonos and Eos, Dawn. One of my poetic achievements around this story conflates it with the Endymion/Selene tale (a blissful form of the pair in the tale) and the rose of the Aurora-princely tale of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. Endymion would be a sleeping beauty, Selene supplying “the kiss of 100 years” in a fresh way.  The poem I reference comparing the three is published here two days before today’s poem.

Tithonos is granted immortality but not youth, by Zeus when Eos, the goddess, Dawn asks for immortality for Tithonos. When Tithonos grows old he begins to babble on and on about all the things he’s lived and knows about life and this is that to which he is forever riven as a result of his unnatural longevity. Eos is dutiful as a lover and shuts him away from the world to live forever in this manner…

…when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.  (see Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite)

3. Other Greek variations in telling the myth of Tithonos say Eos turns him into the first cicada. And here it strikes me this renders something visible. A Delphi of the mind is perhaps suggested here. So when the word Delphi is invoked, it invites both the historical imagination and the soul of this other, earlier Pythian form. Like the twin banks of the river Halex, cicadas sing only one side of Delphi. That side can be likened to the Delphi of the mind in which a patterned potential capable of archetypal activism evermore and particularly now activates in aging psyche. And in the story of Tithonos, Eos can be likened to the likes of the thirteenth fairy who is really the twelfth; she is changing the way Tithonos is fated by Zeus.  (In the painting of Endymion on Mount Latmos, 1879, Grimshaw has painted Selene in the form of such a fairy!)

The river place has become likened to the riven place place of the split, crack, boundary, gap, place for turning outcomes another way; it marks the spot in the temporized zone of the mind’s space―that deep ravine, just where revisioning in poetic seeing is possible. Yet, like that landscape along either side the bank of the Halex River in the story of Eunomos and the cicada, not every kind of poet hears it.

4.  In the same scholarly paper, Georgaki also notes how Thucydides wrote that Athenians wore gold Cicadas in their hair in order to show their "autochthony".

5. There appears to be a comparison in Homer between lily-skinned voices (old age) and the missing note cicada supplies Eunomos…

λειρ-ιόεις, εσσα, εν, prop.

A  like a lily, but in Hom. only metaph., χρόα λειριόεντα lily skin, Il.13.830; of the cicadae, ὄπα λειριόεσσαν their delicate voice, 3.152; of the Muses' voice, Hes.Th.41; Ἑσπερίδες Q.S.2.418.  2 of  the lily, κάρη Nic.Al.406.    see Liddel and Scott  http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?p.43:4.LSJ

6. The application of this missing note, the poetic life’s lilyskin, psyche’s deep voice in the age’s aging seems to be that similar solution Eos supplies Tithonian existence. At first light the goddess puts a Dionysian sweet on Tithonos’ tongue which is drunk with dew; it supplies the missing note giving way to metamorphosis.

Noticing this I note how it is these days. To outlive one’s beautiful youth and still be too young and healthy to die seems to be the lot of a good many retirees.  The spiritual task individuating a long life, what will it have been like? Into what image and likeness will it have been reborn?  How will it show its autochthony?

Having grown up under the sign of the hippie, perhaps wearing the lily skin in our hair is the role of the 60’s generation who are now in their 60’s literally.

THROUGH THE SEEING POOL H-GEEKY

Endymion on Mount Latmos (1879) (John) Atkinson Grimshaw

SEEING THROUGH FAIRIES SEEING THROUGH

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. - John Steinbeck


Sleep's nocturnal algorithm
Endymion's element

©2015 First Nocturne stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords #mpy #writeprompt #5words #2lines #mythopoetics #vss #amwriting #blog #poetry


notes

 For more on JA Grimshaw see http://www.grimshaworigin.org/AtkinsonTheodosia.htm

1. Mythic tales carry image remains and are themselves remainders, burial mounds inscribed with such remains still remaining.

2. Hypnos, God of Sleep, resides in Erebos, the land of eternal darkness, beyond the gates of the rising sun. From here he rises into the sky each night in the train of his goddess mother, Nyx or Night. The Oneiroi, dark-winged spirits of dreams, are often depicted as bat-like creatures. These are his brothers, sons of Night, too. In the form of the spirit of dream, the Oneiroi are given the name, Morpheus and personified in notion. Thanatos, Death, a brother, belongs to this complex as well.

3. Let me begin in such ruins with a Roman-era collection of myths and the account of the one great love story between immortality’s goddess and mortal man. It is based largely on the mythologer and poet Pherecydes of Leros.  His account has perished but he is the one in which this particular telling of the myth whether Rose (Aurora), Eos or Selene.

There are three stories, three lights, three ladies, three lovers but really they are remains of the one story. I am pondering the Roman story of Selene and the shepherd, Endymion, the Greek story of Eos and the Trojan rhapsode, Tithonos and the marchen or fairytale of Sleeping Beauty, Aurora―a Roman reference again. She is called Rose by Charles Perrault in the 100 sleeping years before her kiss with the prince. I am pondering more deeply how analogies are made through poetic meanings held in abeyance. Perhaps I am thinking of a myth of the body that remains embodied and the heroic turn into mythopoetic man as we move from a heroic mode that once made meaning possible to a poetic one making meaning still possible.

I am beginning with the story as it is told in Greco-Roman imagination since it is Greek imagination in western psyche-making which tells our first story of poetic imagination (and imaginally speaking Tithonos is both a Trojan soldier and a poet.) I am musing on how poetic imagination often resolves the problems of the day-world’s mortality during slumber. Night seems to play an eternally important role.

Regarding this apparent change which is made possible in the soul of words as they emanate from the temporized sphere of a dark goddess’s eternity― poetic meanings held in abeyance turns them metaphorically; regarding this changing of hours into h’ours marking just where something new is possible―moreover necessary, there is, the myth shares, once a necessary flaw in that early mythic and poetic dream’s algorithm supposed to resolve the changing of hours in that eternal love affair that always and forever goes on everywhere at once between mortal and immortal things words attempt to embody. What matters embody, matter embodies in the aging remains of our words which live on after we are gone.

The first myth’s “love problem” gets handed down to us today in the story of Aurora’s birth. Aurora is the Roman name given the goddess, Dawn although in the story it is Selene who resolves the solution to the first light’s love problem. Pre-Sentient being is resolving being in a day-world kind of knowing passing between both science and art; the passage between both is a space in which a kind of becoming time in space and becoming space in time share without obstruction.

Here is perhaps a distinction. The Greek Goddess of dawn, Eos, links being to root it in the irrational soul carrying the same light’s meaning both ways. This is just what Selene does in the tale of the shepherd Endymion, Endymion in the same role held originally by Tithonos, soldier as poet. Later on this is the princely role in that moment in Sleeping Beauty with the midnight kiss. Selene resolves the problem Eos has at first light and throughout all time. Moon’s lingo (sleep) resolves for eternity how it is in love with the forms of time, of which, one’s consciousness is also made in image and likeness. The three goddesses form a committee of sleep to do for us now what we cannot do for ourselves daily. Within our remains is our unknowing made known.

The marchen tale, “Sleeping Beauty” carries Aurora’s curse as the rose within it but this curse is a new twist on the original love theme in how love’s “changing movement” turns the logos of hours to h-our or h’our’s psyche-making awareness which cannot ever die. (No matter which ego thinks what next morning!) Alas, because of what ego thinks in the morning and in spite of this, immortal love can only live in the body of matter’s life in as much as we are able to bring it to life ourselves.  Yet, in as much as the committee of sleep sustains our nocturnal algorithm, love seems to find its own way into our world.

The tale of Eos and Tithonos

The tale of Selene and Endymion

Sleeping Beauty In The Wood

THROUGH THE SEEING POOL THEY CAME

THE SEEING POOL 

GODWIVES LIFE-GIVING THE GIFT GIVING LIFE


wild heaven's fairy
dew gifts Aurora

2015 Original Mothering stephaniepope mythopoetry.com



notes

In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about a momentous celebration. #6words #writeprompt
Page_48_illustration_from_Fairy_tales_of_Charles_Perrault_(Clarke,_1922) image in public domain
water overlay applied

Charles Perrault Sleeping Beauty In The Wood

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED #2lines #6Words #writeprompt #amwriting #blog #poetry #mpy #mythopoetics #OHJ #vss

image in public domain

LAST NIGHT IN THE SEEING POOL

Peeking through fairies
seeing through magic


©2015 Expect Magic stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#6words #mpy #writeprompt #vss #2lines #amwriting #blog #poetry #mythopoetics #ohj



notes


In SIX WORDS, or fewer, write a story about what really happened.

NOTHINGNESS & GOD

WHAT POETS KNOW

Between chaos and night, by turns
the nothingness



©2015 Fundamental Darkness stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#micropoetry #mpy #poetheme : between #mythopoetics #vss #2lines #lines #amwriting #poetry





notes

Credits


1. The collage image "Chaos" is  from Ovid, "Metamorphoses".

2. The collage image, "Night" is a painting by August Raynaud.

SPRING GREEN

UNDER MY SKIN

         "Follow your schlange" -C.G. Jung

Ore lay between
either and
the likeness shed here.


©2015 Slinging Schlange stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#lines #3lines #mpy #vss #micropoetry #mythopoetics #amwriting #poetry

THE WHITE BEAUTY: MYTH OF THE VAGINAL SOUL

BEAUTIFULLY WHITE THE VAGINAL SOUL

winged anima spread
finds her animus seated
drug by its own hair

©2015 The Last Winter Moon stephaniepope mthopoetry.com
#poetheme #prompt #mpy #vss




notes

1. For an interesting missive on animus mythos see Gregory Smith, The Myth of the Vaginal Soul at https://web.duke.edu/classics/grbs/FTexts/44/Smith.pdf

REGARDING "FIND", "FIEND" & "FRIEND"

IN THE MADNESS OF MARCH

first stories, Edenic & Promethean
unite find, fiend & friend
living before the fall.



©2015 Good Friday stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#poetheme #poetry #prompt #vss #mpy #3lines #mythopoetics

notes

1. For one turning on hubris and humility in science see Carl Pope’s blog, http://incharacter.org/observation/the-promethean-and-copernican-traditions-in-science/
2. For the longer form of the phrase and to examine in detail the poetic image in the phrase, “Pride goeth before the fall” see Proverbs 16:18 which reads as follows: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
3. For a turning of Ananke, necessary mythic inversions of the edenic see David J. Thomas, D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake: The Edenic Myth Inverted
4. For the poem, “Snake” by D. H. Lawrence provided below see http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/dhl.snake.html

Snake
D.H. Lawrence

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

7

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough*
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

16

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

22

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

32

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

41

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

50

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

58

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

66

And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

71

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Taormina, 1923

 

#OHJ FEBRUARY DAILY WORDS

IN THE GARDEN OF FEBRUARY

THERE ARE CARDINAL TREES
HEART-FELT & RED LUSCIOUS
WITH ELBOW ROOM

©2015 Cardinal Tree  stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#OHJDailyWords, #ohj #vss #mpy #poetry #mythopoetics #3lines

THE FORGE IN THE HEART

Cupid's Forge, Edward Burne-Jones, 1861

FEBRUARY'S POETRY

In Cupid's forge
soul heats up.

©2015 To Thalia stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#6words #2lines #mpy #mythopoetics #vss

____________
notes

1. Assemble of Foules, Chaucer (Assembly of Fowls)

“Under a tree, beside a welle, I seye,
Cupide our Lorde, his arrows forge and file;
And at his feet his bow already lay;
And wel his doughter tempred al the while
The heddes in the welle; and with her wile
She couched hem after, as they should serve
Some to slee and some to wound and kerve,
Couched and arrayed in order sorted”

2.  During the Apollonic era of western civilization, Thalia retained the highest metaphor assigned as the era’s collective soul or inner image-pattern, “the music of the spheres”. The heart itself is a metaphor for the inner life of Thalia or soul-making's aesthetic, "poetic" sense. Each heart has its own intellect. One must bring one’s own intellect into Cupid’s Forge and into the service of Thalia’s psyche-making. And, as one can see from the painting, Thalia’s home lies within a fundamental darkness whereby Cupid’s crimson supplies bright love.

Then, too, I may suppose, should I lose contact with this soul of Thalia whereby a fundamental darkness roots me in the service of this other making, a making which allows her soul to displays its sense to me, the image of Thalia singing the music of the spheres would render—not Thalia but a Silent Thalia. I will not have heard her soul’s inner life singing within my heart its own soul logical felt-sense.

It is in such moments one’s own egoic desires must die back, become pruned like a vine or shorn like a lamb; one must become small again like a child in service to the inner life’s mastery and its space where her dark blossoming may bring new likeness into bloom and fruits in fleshed soul-making.

HEART FELT :: FELT HEART

MY VALENTINE

romantic sot
besotted felt
with cheer


©2015 Oddly Heart Felt Journey stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords #ohj #vss #3lines #sixwords #mpy #mythopoetics

FEBRUARY HOODOO: "HARDY" AND "HEARTY" Oddly Heart-felt Journey #ohj

"...DESCENT INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE ARTICLE...SENSING THE CRUCIALITY AND THE MYSTERY OF THE INFERENTIAL 'AS'." - David L. Miller, Hells, p. 98

TO THY SANDAL'S LAUGHTER

I Sing! Your sly Hermes winged far-away boot
bring now in travels thy luck & thy loot

©2015 Shoe-Do  stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohj #mp #mpy #2lines #vss

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

THE JANUARY DYAD ; THE ARCHETYPAL "YEAR"

ARCHETYPALLY, THE YEAR

Begins and ends January nude, like us at birth
white cold―virgin; gone the great god's chariot

long our masks and roles
a span of short-lived lives open like the gate we are

our poetry the masks and roles we wore
this long absence

©2015 WE WEAR OUR POETRY NUDE stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
#vss #6lines #mythopoetics #micropoetry

GLOBAL STABILITY

The Moon's gravity imparts tremendous energy to the Earth, raising
tides throughout the global oceans.  The quick time animation, courtesy of the Scientific Visualization Studio at the Goddard Space Flight Center shows what happens to this energy. What happens is called tidal energy dissipation.  The wind contributes to this energy
conversion supplying  about half(1terawatt or 1 trillion watts) to the process, the tides contribute another 1 terawatt to the process of dissipation.  More
 

IN THE DEPTH OF SPHERES

unsensed the wind
& moon talk oceans

but with economy
& not about it

not about it
either, oceans

rock
    & roll

©2015 Poetry Chain stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#poetrychain #micropoetry #mythopoetics #vss

MAGGIE CAMPBELL BLUES

SHE COLORS MY HOODOO

Umm, who does ya know comin' down the road?
Well, it look like Maggie, little bit. But she walks too slow

                 ~ Tommy Johnson, Maggie Campbell Blues

Perforce it be true, Maggie
a fork in the road
corn meal salt, dear
lightens the load

Followed your shade here
it brought me this skill
tricks in the road, dear
I'm learnin' still

Perforce it be true, dear
it's given untold
nearer that rider
turnin' it gold

Perforce it be true, Maggie
fork in the road
layin' my salt, dear
lightens the load

©2015 Crossroad Spirit stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords #ohj #poetry #mythopoetics #micropoetry #vss

notes

1. The Lwa imprinted in the crossroad is that to Soba on behalf well-being/health &/wealth
2. For more regarding hoodoo magic and the crossroad spirit see http://www.luckymojo.com/crossroads.html
3. Maggie Campbell Blues written and sung by Tommy Johnson Songwriters: TOMMY JOHNSON, RORY BLOCKMaggie Campbell Blues lyrics © CONCORD MUSIC GROUP, INC 

4. Song Lyrics

Cryin', who did you know
Comin' down the road?
Comin' down the road
Umm, who does ya know
Comin' down the road?
Well, it look like Maggie, little bit
But she walks too, slow

Now, the sun is gonna shine
My back door ov'are the trees
My light due somedays
Ooo-ooo
Come your turn and
My light due someday
And the wind gon' change all
Blow my blues away

Now, cc rider
See what you done, done
See what you done, done
Umm-mmm
Cc rider
See what you done, done
You done made me love you
Now you're through
Tryin'-a throw me down

Well, I'm gon' away, now
Won't be back 'till fall
Won't be back 'till fall
Well, I'm gon' away, now
Won't be back 'till fall
'Till I meet my good gal faror
Won't be back a'tol

Now, who that yonder
Comin' down the road?
Comin' down the road?
Umm-mmm
Who's that yonder
Comin' down the road?
Does it look like Maggie, a little bit
But she walks too, slow.

Umm-mm, goin' baby
Won't be back' till fall
Won't be back' till fall
I'm goin' away, long
I'll be back in fall
Well, I might meet my new gal
But I, I won't be back a'tol.

APPROACHING DIVINE NATURE

Selu at Qualla Boundary, in NC (Eastern Band Cherokee)
photo credit: public sculpture, Waymark also, more views

IN MYTHOLOGICAL FIGURES

original being is a pluck spirit
rubbed & ground to grit
no spirit land held in demesne

©2015 Held In Trust stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#ohjDailyWords #ohj #vss #3lines #micropoetry #mythopoetics


notes

1. For land held in trust see wiki link above on the public lands at Qualla Boundary.
2. For notions of how to get around white mythology and mythic dominants see the blog post at Urocyon's Meanderings, "Selu", March 23, 2010 which provides at least three good sources on examining layers of appropriation when approaching cross cultural boundaries.
3. See Meloukhia's 'What Is 'splainin'? And Why should I Care?
4. See Peggy McIntosh "White Privelege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack". Furthermore, by extension,  how does focusing on racism as a primarily "black" issue mask the plight of indigenous peoples?
5. A little language, a little history, a little lifestyle.

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”