Poem: Arethusa

Arethusa

By Jeanne Joe Perrone
QuailBellMagazine.com

Inspired by Susan Main's voice class and Ovid's Metamorphosis

Arethusa

For me this was a time when I am whole and alive
tasting clean river water, eating fresh berries,
running with Diana and my fellow virgins in perfect
fellowship and fierce purpose; for freedom, for the hunt,
for strength. My body does all it needs and my mind is full of the goddess.

I am whole and alive
clean river,
Diana

virgins

the hunt.

My body, it needs. The goddess.

Save me, goddess. Save my body for you.

The hunt! Oh but I am not carrying my bow, not calloused, and my feet and my heart bleed. He catches the scent of my blood. I can’t reach you from the waves. I am chased as I chase you. I am alive but hunted. Diana, please! Diana, Diana, my goal, my Love.

I am chased, chaste, running, I am clean river water running away from acid rain, my blood and your spirit running, hunted, desperate to stay clean. I choose you.

Catalysis. I am divergent streams chasing Diana but forced to the dirty earth and dripping in caverns beneath, rolled under bodies, gods, oceans and streams, surging, drowning currents, I am pressed down, boiling in the heat of this mortal earth and it’s molten core, songs of steam and sex.

This is not your heaven, my Love, this whisper of “touch, touch, touch.” These hands are not holy; this horn does not call me home. This body, change it - make me rivers and ice.

I am water. I am blood. I am uncreated, wanting only you. Diana, Diana. Why, my goddess, why have you not opened? Your arrows have missed me, slipping through my fingers like heavy oil. You rise above me but I want you sinking in me, in the depths of my troubled Love.

Open the earth, open the ground my goddess, open for me and I will cascade through worlds to find you again, I will evaporate to space and back, I will make myself a glacier and scrape slowly through centuries, seeking you. I am waterfalls. I am subterranean tears. My virgin body chased, coursing and clouded. Only you constant, my sought sea.

#Unreal #Poem #Myth #GreekMythology #Water #Chaste #Hunt #Love #Diana #Sex #Metamorphosis #Bodies 

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