September 2021
Laurie Byro
philbop@warwick.net
philbop@warwick.net
Bio Note: I live off a dirt road in the backwoods of NJ. My husband, Mr Byro, is a soothsayer. He spends most of the night playing the banjo to our gang of cats. This gives me space to create my breathless wordscapes. I see them as feral creatures which have escaped from the cage of my imagination and established a free life in the shared world. I have many Goddess poems who are hoping to be published into a Chapbook and made legitimate. All women of a certain age become crone-Goddesses and we need to be honored as such.
Leto
She chased me and she cursed me for I was pregnant with her husband's child. I walked the dream-lit village, looking for someone gentle enough. I tried to hide, I tried to lay low, make scarce, disappear: nibble someone's ear. It was then I was taken in by a family of wolves. Was there an animal trapped under my shirt, was this a scene straight out of a mortal's wolf dream? I was extreme. Was my host a ghost or the imagination of a wrinkled crone? I was utterly alone. The wolves knew of a keening soil to give birth. I had been banished from all places, shunned, except this sacred soil wasn't tied by a dirt-umbilical to the ocean floor. For nine nights, the birthing wasn't something a mere human could endure. Each grain of sand howled right along with me and my pack. Swans circled the island while sea nymphs sang in delight. Artemis burst out of me, soon she would harness the moon. Then the nobles appeared to witness, Delos Dames, I'll call them, Goddesses who saw that Apollo, our baby Lord was born with a golden sword. Everything he touched would turn to gold, the entire island-- suddenly I was a rich mama. He was the God of the Sun, a healer, he healed the sea, me and as I suckled him, laid him on my breast where he chased away a baby wolf asleep there, I rejoiced. My body filled with star-milk. He was divine and for that moment before he belonged to the world; he was mine.Note: Leto's twin children were the result of an amorous encounter with Zeus, and to avoid his wife Hera's wrath, the Titaness was obliged to give birth on the remote and barren island of Delos.
©2021 Laurie Byro
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