moon pool, colour code for blue
Cyane is older than us all
river home for a Sicilian nymph
but she was no nymphette
she stood up to the death god
abducting her friend Proserpine
called out to him stop, this is no way
to gain a wife let her go Pluto
in self-rapture ruptured earth
Cyane stood in silence, wept
and wept yet more, with each
new tear her body dissolved into fluid
her hair blue as the sea melted
limb by limb shoulder by arm
she wasted away in grief for her friend
when Ceres arrived all speech
had been swallowed into liquid
no words just bubbling and burbling
but she showed to Ceres the sash
of Proserpine and Ceres knew
the truth of her daughter’s abduction
in Syracuse they remember Cyane
her transformation her metamorphosis
from young girl to sacred blue river
notes
Inspired by Book V of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.
I have used the Roman names for the Greek gods in keeping with Ovid’s use. Prosperpine is Persephone; Pluto is Hades; Ceres is Demeter.
Proserpine/Persephone is the daughter of Ceres/Demeter. Prosperpine becomes Queen of the Underworld after she is abducted and raped by Pluto/Hades.
Postscript
There are so many versions of the rape of Propserpine/Persephone and I keep writing about her. I enjoy giving a new slant to mythic tales and Cyane is one of many. I did not know about Cyane until a few years ago. In printing, CMYK refers to cyan, magenta, yellow, black: four colour printing. Cyan is a limpid blue colour. Cyane is also a short river (8 km in length) that flows into the Ionian Sea near Syracuse, Sicily. The Greeks had a colony on Sicily from the 8th century BCE and many of the places you can visit look more like Greece than Rome. Cyane was so grief stricken about the rape of her friend that she literally melted away, but not before showing Proserpine’s mother, Ceres a scarf that Proserpine had been wearing and which Ceres recognises as her daughter’s.
This poem was first published in Metamorphic: 21st Century Poets Respond to Ovid. Edited by Nessa O’Mahony and Paul Munden. Canberra: Recent Work Press. 2017.
It was reprinted in my book The Sacking of the Muses, Spinifex Press. 2019. https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781925950007
(Meet Mago Contributor) Susan Hawthorne