The farm was so far away.

The swine smelled.

Her mother thrived.

But to her, this was hell.

 

She tired of plowing,

Tired of cow hide

She needed something

To free the darkness inside.

 

The apple of Apollo’s  eye

She became.

Persephone turned down his fruit

Without feeling any shame.

 

"Marriage makes one a slave,"

she told her mother.

She had but one choice:

to live someplace other.

 

Demeter’s daughter was silent

As she tied a cloak round her waist.

Persephone ran into the forest.

Where suddenly she was embraced.

 

She awoke and saw her captor.

He made her catch her breath.

This was lair of Hades,

The palace of death.

 

Here the dinners were charred,

And their servants were dead.

Hades was brute and rough

Till he laid a kissed on her head.

 

“Don’t eat the pomegranate,”

He told her one day,

“They make you my prisoner.”

He kept it her choice to stay.

 

Hell was cold and was dark.

The ground cut up her feet.

Still, being his equal

was better than harvesting wheat.

 

Together they ruled.

They welcomed their new souls.

That’s when Zeus arrived

To collect what his kin stole.

 

When he helped her pack,

Hades had tears in his eye.

Six months with him

And she’d never seen him cry.

 

She tightened her cloak

And followed Zeus’s lead.

She glanced down in her hand

At one pomegranate seed.

 

She stuffed it in her mouth

When she was back home.

She already longed to go back

To her underground throne.

 

Demeter cried,

For her daughter was cursed.

Right now the land was green,

But it would soon get worse.

 

The leaves died

As the time became near

For Persephone to return

To that underground lair.

 

Hades arrived

To carry out the curse of the fruit.

She was so darkly grateful

That she knelt and kissed his boot.

 

Her lips tasted the leather

As it started to snow.

From what it was made,

She didn’t want to know.