"Eleusiniana" is a series of hymns to Demeter and her two daughters, in the spirit of the ancient mysteries of Eleusis. Many have sought the contents and essence of the Eleusinian mysteries, but none have succeeded. Yet I feel the glory of the mysteries continues to grow among us in every light, every leaf, and every season.
I offer these verdant verses to the three goddesses and anyone who seeks greenness. They outline the rituals and mysteries of Demeter, Persephone, and a third, previously unnamed, deity.
Mistresses, greenest three of all, grant me your maidservant
Grazing rights to your pastures,
Liberty to share the fruit of your mysteries,
A fecund tongue to articulate them.
May your lush indulgence bring forth nourishing grains of speech.
O Demeter, divine mother of flowing grain,
You nourish us, clothe us, instruct us.
Show the way to the Way; turn us like leaves.
O Kore, daughter Persephone, crisp dawn maiden,
You are the green coming, the green going, and the green returning.
Gentle Potnia, your mysteries multiply in dark and light.
O Despoina, unnamed and unseen, you are light emerging from the floral veil.
Your name is written on the pistils of flowers and in hieratic lines upon the leaf.
Through filtered light in the sacred grove, with the tender caress of a passing frond,
More green than e'er grown, you make yourself known.
In an age when we are eating our seed corn,
Selling tomorrow's harvests for yesterday's gold,
Am I merely gleaning discarded rinds for this paean?
Demeter, are you weeping?
Persephone, are you shivering?
Despoina, are you blossoming?
At a former season when the fields were barren and the grain cache mouldering,
When the sun was sallow and the night ashen,
Blessed Persephone reemerged from her mother's fold and furrow,
Whilst the emerald tongue of Eleusis whispered, "Verdure will endure."
Persephone will walk out of hell into herbal splendor,
Demeter will weep her tender torrents of joy, and
Despoina will remove her veil to drink the air, the air we trade for green.
And so, let us glean.
O Ceres, Proserpina, and Verdant Third,
Vegetation is your expression, your holiness made present to us.
As roots twine in the dark and branches splay out above,
As green flesh dreams light and flowers express fullness,
Your forces delve in us as bodies wander, eyes see, words bloom.
Bright mother, when you turn your gaze to me, the green within me grows
Verdancy is your working within us, your self-fertilising beauty.
In tending the plot and the potherb, we care for and tend towards you.
Exalted spirits of fields with rich dreams underneath,
I give you the corn of my soul, this wrinkled germ of my spirit.
Suffuse this soul-kernel with your moist pullulations.
Ladle the clear terra-preta into my needful lungs.
Grant me the outsized strength of the smallest seed
Becoming a tender sprout,
Which cleaves the crust of the earth,
Craving quenching light and luminous water.
I ask all of this so that I may grow ever in your three directions.
Mystae, these warm bodies will burst melons in midsummer,
And our sweet succulence will spin cycles anew.
When our seed-dotted red flesh is sown in the fertile earth,
Sapient and ripened, we will travel the path of Persephone.
Before that time grows full, let the soil hold you up,
Stretch towards the vault of the sky,
Notice wind, warmth, welkin, wetness,
Practice for your soil journey with a step towards Eleusis.
Plant your feet firmly in the ground and creep along the path.
Be sown in its loving embrace.
Feel the worm crawl past you,
Seek the light within in the gloamy dirt,
Slake your dry thirst on morning dew, and emerge below.
Cultivating patience is more difficult than cultivating green.
All can be blessed as Demeter's twice-born Persephone withal
First as a sprouted germ parting the wet caul of earth,
Then as heavy fruit brought forth trailing an umbilical vine.
In enfleshed life, we are cradled by fruit's sweet pulp, sour juice, and bitter rind.
The germinal spores of the Goddesses permeate forest and desert,
Orchard and wasteland, island and mountain, cave and caldera;
They persist through drought and darkness, flood and fire.
O Great Verdant Mother, our bodies are leafmeal and crave decay,
Weak with inner wilderness, a rose without petals.
Just as your verdure is the slow build-up of minerals from the hard earth,
Make us the subtle accretion of your life,
Let us increase joint by joint, knot by knot.
Mystae, as the misplanted seed finds light, find the path to Eleusis.
Along the Sacred Way, make constant obeisance to the mistress of the garden.
For every arborvita and shrub, every ivy and grass,
Every fiddlehead and weed, every bush and herb,
Every creeper and moss, every wort and lichen,
Every, every all is a shrine to Mother Demeter.
Mark crude little Baubo on your route. She's a stone image in a pot
Under a thatched roof.
Baubo is she who afrights foulness
Uplifting her skirts to the field and shouting bawdily.
Baubo's pudenda outside and outsized
Scare ignorant spirits, fright blight, and assail scale.
Her mischievous parts avert the gaze that damps off seedling and drops buds.
On your first day of travel, find your crop to bless as she.
Shed modesty like a wool garment in heat haze,
And let loose a curse of vulgar wards.
After Baubo's hut, seek the divine sapling by the Wayside.
If you look among the thorny and non-thorny plants,
If you rummage among the leafy and leafless,
If you reach for the mighty or stoop to the creeping,
You will fail to find it.
Yet, at any hour, in any weather, in every season,
You find it along the Sacred Way.
It has no leaves and only two small branches;
its split-twain trunk is ever-peeling,
revealing a bark greener than leaves;
its stem joints seep nectar that tames toothsome ants.
The sapling has a sibling and is a light reflection of that distant twin,
murmuring hymns of hybrid languor.
This child tree, syzygy of the lotus tree,
Fellow-yoked anthropophytum,
Expresses apparent reality in spring:
Zygomorphic self-blooming mirror,
Each dappled blot and brinded dot
Pollinated by the nectar king of long life.
Flowering full with pale margins,
There is a gentle pool with crimson runnels
Dripping through the silent storm,
And blushing pink and creamy yellow emptied cups,
Pink in yellow in pink,
Yellow in pink in yellow
Pouring each other out.

The sapling's fruits are pale dappled emerald.
If plucked by hand or artifice, the tree quivers and howls in pain,
And it fills the fruits with foulest poison.
Yet, if Chronos-ripened and gently plucked by wind,
Flesh is succulent and superior,
Pips are sour bright, and rind is sweet with waxy bloom.
Here is how such a sapling sprang up along the Way:
Ages before the ancients, verdure grew slow.
A seed would sprout and then flower only once across a myriad of years.
Back before the world sped up,
Torrents of rain would fall over countless nights and days.
In that age a sprout broke ground for light and air.
The sprout was a half-dreamed thing called forth from the depths,
Slow to grow, held fast to memory.
The quickening age came quick.
Suddenly, without the years of drizzle, the world rain stopped.
Cloud was ripped apart from cloud.
Moments tumbled over one another in quick succession.
Through jagged cloudbreak the sun arrayed harshly.
Like its gentle worm cousin, the sprout turned to return to earth,
but the ground had grown as hard as stone.
Just as it began to shrivel,
a shadow appeared over it,
its elder twin of shadow.
The sprout could look through its elder other
and see the expanse of shimmering heat.
Yet the shade was solid relief.
Seedling grew to sapling,
An unassuming, shambolic twig.
It still retains its oversized shadow,
Its other self unseen but felt.
Wet your hand with water from your jug.
As you sprinkle the base of Lotos-Syzygos,
Praise its peeling bark,
Honor its fallen fruit,
Adulate its ant laurels, and
Bless its twigs at your decaying feet.
It splits itself in half and half again,
Doubling for you through tumbling ages.
When Persephone falls, want rises.
We now mimic the agony of the trees, which rend their foliage in grief,
Then accept waterlessness, lightlessness, or both.
When the desert blooms, the forest burns.
Green Mother, accept our sacrifices:
Cake, cow, king, and country.
Assemble the tree of cakes in the image of the Lotos-Syzygos,
Baked yoke to yolk.
After cake comes cow.
A single cow is worth ten thousand kings and countries.
We slough, shuck, and flay until the unwieldy is yielding.
Chuck all on Demeter's fields
To feed the wrath of grass.
Each life a little sheaf of wheat, clutched close by its reaper.
As you depart, ruffle your personal loss,
And tie it to a tree as a bright strip of cloth,
Cast grief into the pollinating wind.
Pour yourself out in the decaying stump.
Burn aromatic papers with resin of aloeswood.
Then, mix rustic kykeon of pennyroyal and barley,
Hearty-earthy, murksome clarity of green breath upon the earth.
It turns the hard seed into supple seedling.
Vouchsafe your mystae the hue of you,
Repel calamity from our trunks,
Fortify our root hairs,
And safeguard pome, pear, and pod.
Fill us with light and light green:
The sky first opened for it;
The sun first rose for it;
The night first unfurled for it.
The spring goddess emerging in blossoming time,
A leaf-wreathed head,
A perpetually opening flower,
Her moments in full bloom against the floral stars.
Dark floral spirit, arboreal mother queen,
Your roots commune with bedrock and magma.
Your leaves soar with stars and aurorae.
And Holy Khloros, just as the blossom-heavy tree exhales its fragrance freely,
Each unfurling moment,
Every painful joy and loving sadness,
Emanates from your gentle viridity.
We have come, and we have fasted.
We have drunk your recipe.
We are here to witness your mystery!
Long before the time of seasons, the small mother basked in her salad days.
Ancient moments unfurled effortlessly like leaves from the little tree,
as she combed the world orchard for ever-novel fruit.
In this time and place, every manifestation of the eternal color bore a new form.
Persephone fed the world with the notes of her harp mouth,
Whispering sustenance-full zephyrs to leaves as they ate the light.
The leaves fed Persephone and her beastly retinue in kind.
In that time of world blooming, she picked world flowers and
set them in her basket of light.
Queen of pareidolia, her face became each flower,
Each eye a mark on a petal,
Each hair a fiber in the leaf,
Each arm a supple bough,
Each toe a seeking root.
Every vegetal thing became her.
The hillocks were darkened by a clouded worry above.
A shadow of a king who stowed the riches of below,
Counting and recounting his lifeless inventory,
Recounting and counting his lifeless inventory,
Was led by Zeus to sweet Persephone's greening.
His greed for electrum and precious gem overtook all.
His coffers burst with base elements,
Yet his hounds of hoarding turned lust upwards.
He saw her shining in the unminted golden-hue field.
Demeter's daughter stood atop a floe of gentled lava, land once laid clean by burning.
Hades, as the king was sometimes called, subducted her in lifeless passion.
A claw of lava wrenched through granite and took her down.
Through dirt and sand, bedrock and plate,
She delved deeper than any earthly root, going ever inward.
Persephone took her leave of mortal earth with a scream.
What echoes of green exist down there, amid cellars of salt?
In gentle reflections her bright voice crawled from the ground,
"Green Mother, I am sown alive.
Yet a seed does not sprout twice!
I long for your green and gold and rouge
All mere afterimage against this dark.
Mother Eleusinia, your sky, sun, and soil!"
She was being made to traverse unnatural terrain,
Far from her Mother's vegetaline demesne.
Arching above and closing around she saw fungal forms and cave-hidden growth,
But all was cold waxworks, lifeless resin, noxious mirage.
Chloe's daughter looked to her left and beheld the captor king's face.
She saw salted cheeks, unsated lips, and undying eyes.
He was a man of pale forms who craved static passive being,
Built with unmoving shapes, lorded over an empire of limp shadows,
Forever struggling to contain life's flitting whims.
"My little fruit - I will pickle you in sharp spirits;
slake my thirst on your syrup."
"I have heard tell of a king who rules an undecaying kingdom.
His crown and keep are sterilized to nothingness, untouched by life.
He keeps his organs in canopic jars filled with foul poisons.
He vaporizes the soul and locks up the flesh. Is this you?"
The hell man spoke, but Persephone could not comprehend beyond, "Verily."
Fecundity's child spat in that sapless face,
her spittle clearer than a mountain spring.
It parted Hades' sulphur skin, revealing metal bone.
"I savor feisty quarry; let us quarrel more deep below."
The foul face recongealed with oily sheen.
They entered Hell; and Hades closed in on her.
And thus, the thing was done, and the sacred chest closed as well.
Let in the first season of our vernal queen's mourning.
At the drop of her little leaf,
Mother was struck with grief.
Her arms fell like aborted fruit;
Her mouth filled with tasteless soot.
O Epillated Mother,
Who plucked out her eyebrows and each eyelash,
Rending every hair of her head in grief.
The leaves of the world feel your loss.
Demetrian grief is stronger than any joy,
A wailing heard from every corner.
O Mother Aroura, I do not fear your bounteous wrath.
Though it scours my skin, I clothe myself in it like a wreath,
I wear it as a roughsome laurel.
Your despair is strong like a drought-cured branch;
I lean on it.
In breeze and wind and gale, in all air I hear,
"My beloved child is gone."
Mother, your grief is me.
I catch your keening with my lips.
Your tears wash me into the dirt.
If you live, you know well the pith of Demeter's mourning,
You have tasted drought and flood, heatwave and cyclone,
Earthquake and blizzard, firestorm and typhoon.
These are the moments which echo her cry,
"My pearl Persephassa is gone; I have given birth to sorrow."
The one who lets the seed flow free is herself staunched.
What are we to do as our mild Queen turns sour?
Demeter Erinys, I am the flower searching for you its sun,
The grain of pollen floating in your flowering consciousness,
The redolent root exploring your blessed humus, waiting for your mercy.
We wish to be the grass that bends the sickle,
A supple blade that faces force with litheness.
I am your soil pocked by rain.
Cold air and ice knead my body.
Your mourning churns me by day and turns me to ice in the night.
You grip me, wrenching me into runnels,
Your sadness constricts my heart,
Then I melt me and flow deeper or sublimate in the dawn.
A leaf once yellow does not regreen.
She refused food and drink and did not bathe.
After anguish came true sorrow:
The green of frostbite, of algal blooms, of creeping rashes,
Here, now, there, and then,
Putrefaction flows quickly.
It is mould across plaster and rot within every wall.
It is once noble green creeping into stores of corn.
It is holy verdigris souring coin and devouring cloth.
In the battlefield, the warrior lifts his blade;
Green rust crawls up and crumbles it before the blow.
Here, now, there, and then,
Time taints all grains.
It is metallic like the steel it devours.
In village and town, livers pour out
Bile tinted the color of spring.
You whose eyes crave novelty,
Look upon the transformed earth.
Take in its desolate stare and its emaciated cheek,
Wasted away from maternal longing.
Emptiness is the fullness of the seasons,
When the barrel of the earth is charred and void.