Daphne

Dedication: This poem is dedicated to the artist. Each painting an inspirational provocation.

(We find Daphne in the very initial stages of transformation from stream nymph to laurel tree having successfully evaded Apollo’s pursuit via intervention by Ge, Mother Earth who, heeding Daphne’s beseeches, snatches her from his rapacious grasp. Daphne cries out to Artemis, her mentor, and all the gods.)

Certainly, this is just a strange dream, so real, but not possible.

I give a pinch and awaken to my beloved stream.

Apollo, you love me, infinitely. Eros assured me that.

You would not conspire this most dreadful fate so it must just be my imagination - some twisted delusion, some mind spell.

All those who love me, who know me, would never transform me from lithe spirit to immobile bush.

Perhaps, Bacchus is to blame, and in my stupor, I see my luscious hair transformed into spindly branches, good only for brooding.

Damn crows, be gone!

Father Ladon, Mother Earth, Eros, and Apollo, pulling the marionette strings (yet again?)

What lesson – obey your father? Be submissive? Ge would never surrender to that folly.

Temper my arrogance? Give in to the heart?

This cannot be happening!

Did not their immortality provide millennia of wisdom to know that my entreaty was stoked by terror?

Prophetic, they must have known this could not end well.

How could they do this to me?

They pay no consequence and it all falls on me.

Damn crows, be gone!

Apollo, my maidenhead, held so precious, is nothing to restore my hounds, my bow, gamboling in the stream with my fellow naiad.

I can see that clearly now.

Father Ladon, oh most esteemed of river gods, I, as a laurel, can never honor your wish for grandchildren,

But as Apollo’s bride I can give you the most beautiful heirs a deity could ever imagine.

Mother Earth, I will work endlessly to your honor and glory. I implore you to restore me.

I can do better; I can be better.

Damn crows, be gone!

What does it matter?

I am done. No one will ever love me.

I will dry up, die, rot or blow away, and no one will care.

The crows (those damn crows) will destroy my aromatic leaves.

Bugs will devour my coarse bark, once skin so alabaster.

Worms will infiltrate my polished toes, now gnarly roots, immovable.

I, who just a moment ago was running on the breeze, will be prey to the least of vermin instead of the huntress of noble stags.

I lift my face out of my stem-like fingers - sunlight.

I can smell perfumed flowers, no wait, bay. That’s me, me all the time.

And I am so beautiful.

Apollo is fashioning his crown from my branches. I am loved and immortalized.

And I was true to me and to my virtue.

Really, damn crows, be gone.