Ruxandra Cesereanu: Persephone unveiled

Oh, you spiderchested gods,
flaunting algae beards and teeth like pomegranate seeds,
I am Persephone, once blind, my eyes a golden glass,
now become a seer like a white owl.
While I walk in the fields I can smell the olives
and my bliss curls up like a cat in the sun,
oh, trees ablaze with life, oh dry-rim heathers,
how I longed for you while I’d listen to the tales of dark Hades.
Sea water waves would break on the inside of my ear
like liquid drums thundering:
come into the light, Persephone, get out of the tunnel, Phersephassa,
come, desolate Periphonia!
In the beginning I felt the darkness shrouded
in barren women and men,
I couldn’t grasp at all this blackness
on which grey-tongued dogs seemed to feed.
There weren’t any birds there.
Then, on my left bosom I placed a hollow shell.
I wanted to dream of the flowing meadow,
of the gentle field and of the sun like a yellow sacrificial blade,
I wanted to touch the grass, even if it had been scorched,
I wanted to touch the leaves of countless families of trees.
For days and days I would sing out names of flowers:
daisies, pimpernel, campanulas,
dandelions, wild roses, poppies,
tousled flowers, flowers sweet to touch and smell.
The air was a hidden temple,
I would wander dazed, taste of tinder in my mouth.
And suddenly, at dawn I breached the wall,
and I could smell mad lemon,
and I got out into the shady light sleepless as I was.
First I saw the zephyr-stirred field,
and heard the birds rushing above the sea,
and shrubs had Gorgon hair,
then I shouted and made an oath to the sun.
I cut the storms’ head for all time
and the sea seemed white like a soft lamb.
The guards’ lips were covered in sand when they let me pass.
Now my joy is a fountain,
I say be praised,
water and sun, air and fruit,
grass and fish, bell and flower!


KORE PERSEPHONE (2004)

Ruxandra Cesereanu: The Young Erinys

My long hair hangs in the air like winding twigs,
my viscera are fiery,
my face alive with wrath and glory,
the supplicants, terrified, lock themselves in cells,
but I am tired and I’d like to sleep
a whole spring on a deserted island.
My tongue glistens,
I’d speak scorpion stinging words,
I’d listen to the counsel of clawing birds,
night watches speak of my limestone temples
where fragrant rush holders are lit.
My body, a Corinth puma, feels trapped in trawl,
I shake tempestuously, I turn, I vibrate,
I am the young Erinys who steps on soles of mist.
Stone daggers slit my senses,
amongst the blind blood goddesses I was the shark of clay.
I can bet on the shadows of the dead,
my innate enchantress dreams
now blow like the zephyr, unlike the leaden storms.
The roar within is a hollow mountain,
at the daybreak I’d like to learn the language of light.
On a black widow’s boat I leave myself
for a white widow which could still be me.
Diffidently, I am listening to my rain filled heart,
a moving fruit, wandering the trees of desires.
I no longer want to cut with the witching sticks in the flesh of trouble,
if I lost my venomous traces,
I could create hyacinth from sea foam.
I was a wretched Erinys, a laudanum drinker across mad realms.
But from now on to hell with all the witching sticks,
with all the plagues and my unkind mouth,
and my bloodthirsty slobber,
let all the altars crumble under the shadows of blazing dead,
under the gorgons,
I don’t want to stay under the sign of the crescent moon,
burning within me there’s a priestess of the yellow sun
I am proclaiming for the first time.
I’ve broken in a swirl of feet
the dam of grass like thousands of buck horns.
Ahoy!

KORE PERSEPHONE (2004)

Ruxandra Cesereanu: Idling Periphonia

I adorned my thighs, my hips, my ankles with thyme garlands,
on a gloriously reigning afternoon.
I smelled like a maenad,
but my auspicious god had been sleeping for three nights.
I was dozing amongst plump cats
traveling fishermen had brought on their boats,
when I felt a claw in my chest
as if my ribs had been entered by birds.
Their master, the fowler, had twiggy hair and a body like a candlestick,
in the scented temples glowing at the horizon.
Periphonia, stay away from love as if it were a curse,
do not shut the door on my advice.
Demeter was braiding my hair like a tamed lioness,
my young woman braids
which were my noose in front of Hades, but also my rescue rope.
The sea was cloaking my body like a steaming god’s tongue,
I was yearning after a thing I could not smell
and could not see.
My bosom was shimmering like cups with fig wine,
tanned by the mad sun rolling oranges.
I was purring like a cat, I was simmering like a woman,
I was twitching from the shell, thousands of twining venules.
From afar I could hear a fowler’s voice:
come the cage, Periphonia,
come, beloved olive Kore.
On the roadside, in the cells, the soul
of the dead burnt in melted candles,
my fulfilled womanly flesh was like saffron,
saffron stirred by salamanders.
Languorous beast, suckled by stillness,
who are you, torpid Periphonia?
The sun stirred whirls like amber on my skin,
it stirred brown paths and flames and hot death glaze,
in the festive torpor.
Chalk heat creatures climbed
my body as if climbing a starry volcano,
there were yellow haired herbs
and the wreaths of the precipice enlaced my head.
Endlessly clad within myself,
I stroked myself, I smelt, I bit
the steamy comb of the giggling flesh.
My adorers rubbed wild oils on me,
their hands rustled busily like rattles,
they painted the hair in dark clay from the mouths of the dead.
My bloodstreams tensed,
so alive that they would step even on death,
chaining him and making him forget about himself.
There was hyacinth in the sea air,
the spindle of my body went deep down through the sand,
among sunflower jellyfish and dandelion-scaled fish,
my closed eyelids seamen on thrashed gold meadows.
Oh, fertile Periphonia, the twiggy haired fowler shouted,
while I was quivering like a soft Aegean Sea big cat,
mistress of death, if you are there,
turn light into delight and drowsiness into drunkenness,
to blind death in the agonising wasteland.

KORE PERSEPHONE (2004)