The Ninth Dawn

Drawing by Henry Fuseli


The Ninth Dawn


It is not for nothing we notice a wider
theme in Virgil's "Georgics" when speaks
about the passion of Orpheus and Euridice.
The gods want the honey in the hive,
are willing to have the lovers destroyed.
There is a grand design pulsing
around the perishing. A great sound
in which we can barely hear the lovers
crying each other's name.
It doesn't matter that Procue's
bloodstained hands left marks
on her breasts. Virgil writes of
important troubles, a country at war,
droughts and plagues, suffering
and wrongs. But the gods are interested
only in the honey, their minds filled
with the smell of burning rhyme used
to mitigate the hives. I am haunted
by Euridice, who merely went too far
into the woods and after lived with
the darkness around her forever.
I think of her loss and crying out
as I listen day and night
to the man upstairs whose cries
of pain are like a wounded animal,
unable to do anything by suffer.
The gods instruct us to cut
the throats of eight beasts, throw in
poppies, kill the jet-black ewe
in the beautiful Italian light.
So the bees who have been the
real business all along, will swarm
out again under the pliant boughs.

Linda Gregg