Persephone Descending

It’s almost time for me to leave

mother says she hates the fall,

flowers and herbs going to seed,

vegetables too puny to peddle,

no spring

in her step or the air, nothing to plant.

She stands before the hearth, still and beautiful as a flowering plant,

like that will change anything, make me not want to leave.-

I’ll be back in the spring,

just give me the fall.

You take my petals,

I’ll swallow his seed.

The best part of the pomegranate is the seed;

It’s a seed you eat, not a seed you plant.

The bursting juice is better than the velvet petal

of a rose, more assertive than a tree without leaves,

and knows more about love than spring.

There’s a secret sorrow in spring,

a tiny bit of sadness, dropped into the warm earth like an ignorant seed.

It will never know the decadence of fall,

Before October, it will be a mature plant,

be completely familiar with the anguish of August, die in September when everyone leaves.

And everything becomes desperate and meaningless, petulant Posiedon stirring the ocean into the muddiness of a puddle.

What good is a plucked petal,

scent a distant memory, like Christmas on a warm spring

evening full of promise, dogwood blossoms becoming leaves

that will become crimson in the fall,

flowers in a vase in a window in a room in a house in a town near a plant

on a river through a forest full of scattered seed

Now autumn is here and so is the seed

I greedily swallow, aril and pit—no flower nor petal.

Had I known its power, I would have devoured the entire plant,

roots, trunk, branches, leaves that spring

around this delicious fruit that’s ripe in the fall,

allowing me to leave.

I prefer the rich decadence of fall to the frivolous flirtation of spring,

just as I would reject the pretty, worthless petal for the tiny, powerful seed,

but all I can do is take an idea, plant it, and leave.