There she was, playing with her friends,
oblivious to all the evils in the world,
unaware that she was being watched by a
cold
figure. Hard as stone
is what they call me, heartless as I am
cruel,
but not so cruel as to not let her finish
her last necklace of seeds.
It was then that I took her, like the
earth steals away seeds,
into a dark land where shadows and
silence were her only friends.
I must have seemed cruel
to surround her with reminders of her
sunlit world,
rubies and sapphires flaming in her eyes,
almost more than stone,
until she touched them and felt nothing
but cold.
But that is precisely why I needed her.
She alone could bring to this cold
fortress rays of joy and warmth. She
could scatter seeds
of life among the breathless stone.
She could make friends
with the monster that carried her away
from her innocent world,
and only her sweet innocence could
forgive an act so cruel.
But the story has not yet started to be
cruel.
After several months she began to ignore
the cold
and saw what beauty there was in my bleak
world.
Affection and pity had planted their
seeds
and grown between us so that we were
almost friends.
It was then that I truly resented my
world of stone
and what I had become, hard and unfeeling
as stone
itself, yet aware of how cruel
I was and that if we ever were to be true
friends
I would have to let her return to her
warmth and I to my cold.
She had planted seeds
of light that would forever grow in my
world.
And so I told her that I would let her go
back and to forget this world,
to forget fires without warmth and men
with hearts of stone,
to go back to her games and necklaces of
seeds.
But sometimes stone is not so hard when
nature itself is cruel
enough to tempt a girl into imprisoning
herself forever in the cold
earth, far away from light and friends.
So were we friends or enemies, half
trapped and half free in this world
of cold, unfeeling stone,
and was it a sweet curse or a cruel
blessing, that she ate the pomegranate seeds?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is a quite a flashback! I wrote this sestina in my sophomore year of high school, after reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s telling of the myth of Pluto and Proserpina. It’s quite rough, and it’s easy to see the repetition of the six words over and over. If you read my next sestina, “After the Fall”, (which I wrote just one year later) you can see a lot of progress. Still, I don’t think “Hades” is half bad for a first attempt!
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