There were altars all around and the priestess with hair streaming called with a voice of thunder upon three hundred gods, Erebus, Chaos, triple Hecate, and virgin Diana of the three faces. She had also sprinkled water to represent the spring of Lake Avernus. She also sought out potent herbs with a milk of black poison in their rich stems and harvested them by moonlight with a bronze sickle. She found, too, a love charm, torn from the forehead of a new-born foal before the mare could bite it off. Dido herself took meal in her hands and worshipped, standing by the altars with one foot freed from all fastenings and her dress unbound, calling before she died to gods and stars to be witnesses to her fate and praying to whatever just and mindful power there is that watches over lovers who have been betrayed.

love-lies-bleeding

To love this flesh,
its rivers and valleys,
its fruits,
ripe or rotting…

To finger the pricks of a bush,
lick the blood of the world
with a warm tongue,
and comprehend a crow’s hunger…

To endure
without any sense of time—
to wake, sleep, live and die
under the same sun, moon and stars,
eternal as a weed.

We bear within us the seeds of all the gods,
the gene of death and the gene of love—
who separated them, the words and things,
who blended them, the torments
and the place where they come to an end…

the immortal man and his light

To follow the seasons and support the majesty of the years;
To sow the seed and to watch it thrust through the soil;
To call the flower from its hiding place
And give it strength to nestle its own life,
And then to pluck it when the storm laughs in the forest;
To raise man from secret darkness,
Yet keep his roots clinging to the earth;
To give him thirst for life, and make death his cupbearer;
To endow him with love that waxeth with pain…