Adult:
Semele Revised
Drenched from bloody ritual, no innocent was she,
bathing in the sizzling heat of Zeus’s greedy eyes.
Craven lust rejected the Celestial Virgin’s chill
for the flame of Semele’s
imperfect piety.
Zeus, in tangling vines, on lion’s claws, with
viper’s coil, ٰ
came nigh, flailing in her fleshy marsh with sightless
tail.
Mighty god he was, afraid his wife would catch
him. Ah!
Laughing Semele, mere
woman, rent from irony.
Jealous, foolish Hera misperceived the matter. All
earthly life is alchemy and never is destroyed.
Fearless knowledge reveilled
Semele’s border cry,
“Show the truth, if you are God, reveal your glorious
face!”
Lightening seared the grass but
thunder silenced in the womb.
Cursing his destructive power, Zeus, old furnace,
wept
self-aggrandized, tragic tears for pitied Semele,
who annealed, in patient peace, awaiting her rebirth.
Ruined temples, sculpture shards recall the Breath of
All.
Zeus and Hera are decayed, while woman’s Southern
Crown,
fired by the Father, sky set by her twice born Son,
glitters, pulses, on and on, throughout the Milky Way.
ٰ Based on Nonnus, as described in “Fear of Sex Nonnus’
Dionysiaca”
by R. F. Newbold from Electronic Antiquity:
Communicating the Classics.
Eds.: Terry Papillon
& Andrew Becker, April 1998, Vol. IV, No.2.
by
Leslie Hughes