Liber Plutonis - Chapter 20

Verses

You keep telling the story as though I remained the girl in the meadow.

Yes, there were flowers. Yes, the earth opened. No, that is not the only thing that happened.

I learned the names of the dead before poets learned to pity me.

I sat beside Hades and discovered that silence is not the same as weakness.

The living imagine the underworld as one long scream. Mostly it is administration, memory, and people finally unable to leave the room.

I ate the seeds. You may argue forever about coercion, fate, hunger, law, and symbol. The seeds remain eaten.

A pomegranate is beautiful precisely because it resembles a wound that organized itself.

When I returned above, my mother embraced the daughter she remembered.

I loved her. I was no longer that daughter.

Spring is not innocence restored. Spring is the queen of graves permitting green things another season.

Do not call my descent a lesson about obedience.

Do not call my return proof that nothing was lost.

Something was lost. That is why the return had weight.

Hades rules the dead; I rule the fact that the dead are never merely absent.

Every seed enters darkness wearing the shape of a burial.

When it rises, fools call this reversal. I call it competence.