Journal - Poetry

The wrong candle

This candle must have come from petroleum, stolen black stash of Hades, not wax of Kore’s bees. A philosopher wrote that a proper tragedy must begin with an offense, an unpunished crime which informs the nostrils of Furies. Sooted wick, smoke untrimmed and teach the alarm. A little blur of heat and light hovers above the yellow glow. This candle was once plant-flesh soaked in archaic sun-gold, fallen in the layers of millennia, squeezed by earth’s press to fill the cisterns of the underworld. Some choice bits of death Hades gives back each year to nourish new life in her […]