When Demeter the gracious mother of Persephone,
Rejoices with her daughter, with bounteous harvest blessings,
On those halcyon days, in sacred groves that were verdure clad,
Eurydice and Orpheus would make music for the the nymphs and dryads.
Pan too would pause ; his lute quiet in the evening breeze,
The winds echoed the tune ; the leaves sighed the lyrics.
She listened with sweet sadness as she plucked the tender hyacinth,
On a dusk such as this the dark Hades had met the lovely Prosperine.
Orpheus , Eurydice’s love was not Cupid’s game or an Olympian whim,
Their love was welded at Vulcan’s anvil with Euterpe’s lyre’s rhythm.
Their love was a fire that blazed with libations of their shared melody,
Their love ached and soared higher than Olympus, yet in mortal ecstasy.
Then she departed to the netherworld– his name a song on her lips.
Orpheus the mortal demented in love, carried their song across the Styx.
Did Charon shed tears of fire when Orpheus sang of longing and loss,
Did Cerberus hear the bereft melody and his lethal heads did pause?
So he went, the lover Orpheus, with music that bled from his soul,
The lyre wrenched his fingers and the lyrics choked his tear- torn throat.
Yet he sang, and the song was his prayer, plea, despair and his wrath,
Perhaps Hades thought of Persephone and felt love’s terribly sweet hurt?
Then a soft song sang the free but accursed Eurydice,
Her curse and her redemption was the music of Muse Euterpe.
Maybe Eurydice was passionately singing Orpheus’s heart- song,
So he forgot Hades, remembered this song and oh he turned around!
Perhaps in another world where the gods walk the earth with men,
Where love is imperfect yet invincible but melody is eternal and divine.
In that world maybe Hades will not curse or say “you will not turn”!
And Orpheus with his Eurydice will sing together, once again in the sun.
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