By Jena Woodhouse.
The mythic story of that dyad travels from antiquity:
a daughter spirited away, the mother inconsolable—
in retrospect a turning point when matriarchy was usurped.
Demeter weaves the veil of time, archived in collective mind,
sublimating grief with yarn to calm her rapid pulse;
her heart, which aches and throbs, but cannot grasp
the absence of her child. The storyteller’s thread of breath imbues
her tale with energy: the saturnine abductor must relinquish her,
reluctantly, but only on condition that she will forsake
the sun for him, having spent a season in the presence of Demeter.
Her luminous return is marked by green and gold, by ripened grain,
nesting birds arriving, and by offerings of gentle rain.
At the advent of the Maiden, inert Earth revives again.
Votaries will witness rites that venerate creation,
the cyclical awakening to life’s regeneration—
