Diana

(Diana and Endymion, Walter Crane 1883)

Every night she is sacrificed

To the poet’s wet blade.

Her silver stomach is opened,

Her pockmarked face writhes in agony

As the poet removes her organs,

Draping their neck with flesh,

And uses her blood to refill their pen.

They write odes to her, or elegies,

Improper words which are too easily fumbled

Out of mouths and out of ink,

And onto the page where readers think

That she is theirs.

Rhythm makers assume she is in love

With their sonorous words,

But it is to the ocean she throws their pages.

She dips her belly in the waves,

And she nourishes the clouds and stars and night

With seafoam and sea spray,

But for poets she turns the wolves against them.

Ravenous mouths and hungry knives,

She encourages their shadows to leave their corners

And strike out with obsidian rage.

Heresiarchs scatter,

Back to their hovels they scamper,

Waiting for blistering morning 

And the chance to do it all again, but better.

Yet she cannot die, though versifiers try

To ensnare her in flimsy black nets of words,

Placing her heart upon a mantel.

She is immortal,

Her stomach stitched back together

By the threads of constellations,

Swaddled in her queen’s dark blanket,

Her organs replaced and her heart renewed,

Every night,

While verse dissolves away like sand in water.