Saxon Henry added the following poems as comments to the previous post, The Circle, the Fall and Persephone. Daphne and Persephone are her favorite mythological figures. It seems unjust to leave them in the underworld of the comments section, so I raised them into the present post. Thank you, Saxon.

Daphne

I was frozen at first, afraid to move.
Splinters fester, you know.
If one invaded my taut skin,
who would remove its dark heart?
So, from the start it was too late.
I was already thinking, lost,
as wooden as the bed frame we’d bought
the week before the wedding.

Persephone

My marriage is hell. No, really.
A difficult address for a precocious girl
who once delighted in the profusion of hibiscus—
those yellow tongues protruding
toward the clamor of bees.

In early Spring, when Japonica pushes
her passion-tinted blooms from icy stems,
my husband puts on his dark mask of longing.
It’s always a fight. But I have no choice
but to rise like the one dry, restless leaf
made nervous by the wind.

He could never live like this: baffled
like the butterfly that stubbornly fidgets
outside the plate glass window,
confounded by the invisible wall
of unattainable sky.