(Poem) Cyane by Susan Hawthorne

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


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