Poetry by Cecil Morris

                 ​Kevin Doncaster CC




​Persephone Comes Home


When she returned, our pale Persephone
squinted against the sun and tried to hide 
in her own hand's shade.  She spent hours
in the bath with the lights out, the shame caked 
in her creases dissolving in glacial
time.  Then followed the eon of silence,
when Persephone avoided our eyes
and would not utter any words at all, 
when she only sighed or whimpered—the dog
that smells but cannot taste, the dog chained outside.
At last she began to whisper and mumble
her story, how she went down with oxy 
and company to a world beneath our world,
to Acheronian hibernation,
sedated in earthen cocoon, transfixed
by stillness and roots twining through her hair
and claiming her until, one day, she heard
her name sung in canon perpetual 
by tireless distant voices, our voices 
singing our Persephone back to us.

​



Persephone Falls and Falls


We no longer speak her name, do not call
her sorrow to us; our shrill parental 
voices will not resurrect her, will not
lift her from the shadows, can not compete
with the poppy’s swaddling enervation.
We used to sing her name, to warble it
like daybreak birds announcing the bright sun’s
arrival.  In the days before these days,
we were her acolytes, attendants
to her rise, to her blossoming, to her
wilting, the first of many falls.  We’d call
and call until she’d come home, a shower
of tears and excuses, tears and promises,
a litany of laments.  Then she’d retreat
into her room, into her bed, and dig
like gopher down, tunnel into sleep,
a tuber we would water with our tears.
When we’d pull her out, pull her up, she’d go
and fall again to oxy’s sweet embrace.

​


​
We Can't Even Tell Ourselves


Here in the temple of dark and light, our eyes dialed wide 
to see the horrors man inflicts on man, the intended hurts,
the cruelty casual and accidental, we wait for our turn 
to feel we matter enough for pain.  We try to stay loose,
relaxed, open, our arms and legs both slightly splayed,
our lips parted, the storm drain ready for deluge.  We take
slow shallow breaths, almost imperceptible, quiet 
as snow falling, settling, waiting for first tracks, for crunch
of first boots crashing through the surface, marring it's white
exterior and slamming tremors echoing down dark hearts
of rabbits, moles, timid souls.  The underground, the inside, 
the blending in.  The secret cisterns begin to seethe, 
an unexpected carbonation, cold clench in the throat
when car misses us in the crosswalk and we feel the wind 
after it's gone and flinch too late to have saved ourselves.
Enough of that, we say without speaking and draw our limbs 
back to our bodies, touching only ourselves, holding 
our ruby of fear close, a badge we won or found
and will count as pain and keep as animal memory -
furtive, feral, claw embedded as our unspeakable need. 

​


Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching English, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and enjoy. He enjoys ice cream too much and cruciferous vegetables too little. He has poems appearing in 2River View, Cobalt Review, Ekphrastic Review, Midwest Quarterly, Poem, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.