The Wrecking Light Read Online Free

looked
upon the naked mysteries with uninitiated eyes.
The first to see him, the first
to rush at him, the first
to hurl her sharpened wand into his side,
was Agave, his mother,
screaming: 'Come, my sisters, quick!
There is a wild boar here we must kill!'
And the three sisters led the rest
and fell on him in frenzy,
and Pentheus the king was terrified, crying out,
confessing all his sins. Blood
streaming from a hundred wounds
he called to Autonoë: 'I am Pentheus!
Don't you know your own nephew?
Would you do to me
what the dogs did to Actaeon, your son?'
But the names meant nothing to her,
and she simply
tore his right arm out of its shoulder.
Her sister, Ino, wrenched off the other
like a pigeon's wing.
With no hands left to pray, no arms
to reach for his mother, he just said,
'Mother, look at me.'
And Agave looked, and howled, and shook
the hair from her face, and went to him
and took his head in her hands
and in a throb of rapture
twisted it, clean off.
In her bloody grip, the head swung
with its red strings: 'See,
my sisters: victory!'
And quicker than a winter wind strips
the last leaves from a tree,
so all the others ripped Pentheus to pieces
with their own bare hands.
    By this lesson piety was learned,
and due reverence for the great god Dionysus,
for his rites, and for this holy mountain shrine.

LESSON
    The green leaf opens
and the leaf falls,
    each breath is a flame
that gives in to fire;
    and grief is the price
we pay for love,
    and the death of love
the fee of all desire.

THE DAUGHTERS OF MINYAS
After Ovid
    Son of Zeus, son of the thunderbolt,
Iacchus the twice-born, child
of the double door, Bromius
the roaring god, the coming one,
the vanishing one, the god
who stands apart; god of frenzy
and release, god of the vine.
The one
of many names and many faces.
xsxsThe horned god. Young
beyond time.
The god
that changes. The Other.
Dionysus.
    ***
    And noise, just a lot of noise: drums,
cymbals, flutes — not even music — shouting
and screaming and dancing up the mountain
to kill some goat, no doubt. And all that blooming
ivy

'They say Mount Cithaeron flows with blood...
    'Wine, more like.'
    'They say the king has gone.
That when the women were done with their play
and finally laid him down
he must have been tired
for his head rolled away like a stone.'
    'They're all drunk. I wouldn't believe a word.
Another false god turns up and off they go.
If that pretty boy's a son of Zeus, then I can fly.
Believe me, it will pass.
It's the priests I blame: whipping up this madness.
Our servant girls deserting their tasks —
their looms and basket-work — unbinding their hair
and putting on garlands, carrying those
spear things,

those fennel stalks tied up with vine leaves,
burning incense — and all of them dressed
in
animal skins,
for heaven's sake.
You won't catch me in some procession
up a mountain with a bunch of stupid girls
because a priest says we should celebrate a god.
Him and his so-called mysteries.
We are the daughters of Minyas
and we have our god — sweet Pallas Athena —
and we don't need a false idol, or his wine.
Let's pass the hours while we spin and weave
by telling stories, and by the time we're done
all will be quiet and everything back to normal.'
    'Here's one. About how the mulberry changed
from white to red because of blood.
An Eastern story this, about the handsome Pyramus
and his neighbour, the beautiful Thisbe.
Separated by their parents, and a wall,
each night they kissed the stone that lay between.
They pledged to meet, after dark, by this tomb
with a mulberry bush nearby. Thisbe gets there first,
but is scared off by a lioness all bloody-mouthed
from some ghastly business. She escapes,
but drops her shawl, which the beast tears to pieces.
Then along comes Pyramus, finds the shawl
and thinks she's dead, so kills himself.
Blood everywhere. All over the bush.
Then Thisbe returns, of course, sees her loved one
lying dead, and kills herself. More blood,
and that's why