Tag: ancient

poemsforpersephone:

ATLAS: do not talk to me of the weight of the world, 
nor its people’s hearts. you know nothing of endurance.
the heavens are heavy and my shoulders ache. 
i am tired.

APHRODITE: you think holding the earth is enough?
you think you are close to them just because they rest on
your back? you know nothing of their pain. do you even remember
how tears taste?

ATLAS: i know pain. i know bruises that last centuries,
bone deep and digging like claws, burrowing like worms
through body structure-

APHRODITE: -you know standing still, rigid, a statue in body
and soul alike / you know the exact weight of the human heart
x 7 billion. you do not know how it feels to watch as they burn in place,
how it feels to see them fall; down / in love / to their deaths.

ATLAS: i carry them in life and death. my dear, your hands
are soft; they do not understand the strength it takes to balance
oceans on knuckles and land against muscle.

APHRODITE: my hands are soft because they hold hearts
as easily as you hold the world, and hearts, in their own way, are worlds.
i know strength. better yet, i know how easily strength crumbles
and i know how to guide through the breaking. do not equate soft
with weak. they are not the same thing.

l.s. |

APHRODITE vs ATLAS: on the subject of strength

© 2016

histhory:

Mythology aesthetic: Hades & Persephone

Lost in hell, Persephone,
take her upon your knee.

Persephone was titled Kore (the Maiden) as the goddess of spring’s bounty. Once upon a time when she was playing in a flowery meadow with her Nymph companions, Kore was seized by Haides and carried off to the underworld as his bride. Her mother Demeter despaired at her dissappearance and searched for her the throughout the world accompanied by the goddess Hekate bearing torches. When she learned that Zeus had conspired in her daughter’s abduction she was furious, and refused to let the earth fruit until Persephone was returned. Zeus consented, but because the girl had tasted of the food of Haides–a handful of pomegranate seeds–she was forced to forever spend a part of the year with her husband in the underworld. Her annual return to the earth in spring was marked by the flowering of the meadows and the sudden growth of the new grain. Her return to the underworld in winter, conversely, saw the dying down of plants and the halting of growth. (x)

thoodleoo:

thoodleoo:

thoodleoo:

what showwriters think lgbt people want: gritty shows with unhappy queer people who find their attraction a struggle and are ultimately killed off for tragedy porn

what lgbt people actually want: a sitcom about ancient lesbos where lesbos’s famous lyric poets, sappho and alcaeus, are best friends trying to get girlfriends, and sappho is way better at it than alcaeus is

alcaeus, all alone in a bar with his lyre, plucking its strings sadly: it’s just so hard sappho. there just must not be any girls here looking for anyone today.

sappho, with her arms around two girls, on her way out the bar: what was that, dear

#OKAY EVERYONE IS SAYING SAPPHO WOULD DO BETTER #BUT REMEMBER SHE LITERALLY WROTE A POEM DESCRIBING HOW USELESS SHE IS WHEN SHE SEES A WOMAN?

fair point, but consider: the premise of the show is that even sappho ‘holy shit is that my crush ohhhh my gods oh shit did she look at my OHHHHH my GODS i am dying i am literally DYING’ of lesbos is better at getting a girlfriend than alcaeus is, and the show follows her trying to show him in increasingly ridiculous ways how to flirt with girls

he ends up getting a boyfriend instead