Eurydice’s song

Fotografia Olho de Gato

There is no returning,

This he would not see.

How in this darkness,

Darker than he had imagined it to be,

I had sloughed off

Everything he had wanted for us,

Had seen our lives

As an endless rise and fall

Of small desires.

Not love in his arms,

But the ecstasy of a great pine

Rising above us,

Or the sun in an autumn sky—

Effects he worked so hard for—

There were those moments.

But what are they

Compared to the crystal

The dead become, growing

All knowledge into one,

And light blazes from our sides

A light the living cannot see.

I followed him upwards

Along the narrow way, reluctantly,

As one who would be forced

To know old pains and sorrow.

How often he had sung

Of mankind’s woes, not mine,

For I was there for him

And from my heart he rose day after day

Renewed to make his songs

Adored, followed, himself

By lesser poets sung.

There was nothing I cared

To return to. He chattered

Like a child, reminding me

Of this and that thing we’d done.

Then, was it his impatient nature

Or a sudden glimpse

Into my shrouded silence made him pause?

Wasn’t it a clutching unease

That we’d outgrown each other

Made him turn, as I knew he must

The moment before the light would burst

On my sealed eyes?

And I was free, and he,

Half-divining, understood

The trials yet to come,

The outraged women

And the river’s flood.

Celia Gilbert