Shé Hawke
(USA)
Aquamorphia: Falling for Water
EUKOSMIA
Mother of Gods, great nurse of all, draw near
Divinely honor’d, and regard my pray’r …
From thee at first both Gods and men arose
From thee the sea and ev’ry river flows
Orphic Hymn XXVI to the Mother of the Gods
– Thomas Taylor Translation, 1792:1512
In a beginning …
from a cryptic darkness
born of time, space and necessity
came the first liquescent soak
sprayed forth in wide array
venerated parthenogenetic
Creatrix of All
who would trouble Gods and poets
and men in times to come
few would give the triple deity her due.
Her holy moist Metisian fragments
imagined galaxies
leaked stars, seas, earths
creatures and sexes to life
a sovereign orb atomised by cosmic mayhem
wed to intention
her vapours everywhere present.
This Aquamater milk-producing bosom of life
invites us home to the sacred covenant
to re-member our moist beginnings
the original feminine divine
through Erikapaios, Phanes and Metis
the intrinsic numinousity
of the fragmented
aqua trinitarian doxology:
mother
daughter
holy spirit
APOSTASY — THE FALL OF WATER
For Zeus at the start of his long theological assault,
had taken as his first wife Metis …
Infinitely wise … knew more than all the Gods.
– Joseph Campbell, 1991:149
Zeus craftily deceived her … put her in his belly.
– Hesiod’s Theogony, 143-145
Time passes.
Zeus of the fifth reign of Olympus
in a consuming sweep of greed
knowledge and power
becomes the All.
Intelligent progenic ultra-sexed water
descended from the First Cause
replaced now by intellectual air
the greatest trick of all time
drinks the pregnant Metis
who has assumed her originary water form to evade him.
She disappears from common vulgar myth
once Hephaestus breaks her waters
and Zeus declares their daughter Athena un mothered
born from his hydro-cephalic head
his best idea.
Matricidal plagiarist.
How very dare you!
Athena spawned full grown and wise
stolen from the homage of the divine
chora
arrogated by phallic logos
even still.
The sacramental tears of this genesis
weep Thalassa into teeming life
hold Zeus to account for irreverent disavowal
of water and maternity both.
Metis finds refuge
in the amniotic sea of her creation
receptacle of an infinite kind
files his fall from grace for aeons
in the deep aquamorphic abyss.
As ruler of clefts and fissures
cousin of the Oceanids and Nereids
fifth reign descendent of herself
Metis sets traps for Poseidon and lesser gods
who would claim ownership of the waters
fight the first water wars.
And she waits
patiently she waits
with Tethys and Oceanus
and their 3,000 aquagenies
for un-secreted time
waits for her transfiguration
the overdue recognition
of her phylogenetic labours
the partitioned veil.
chora chora chora
trans-parent waters
first milk displaced
FROM HOLY TO DEMI-GOD
Language is an Orphic fragment.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
Eurydice was not meant
for long mortal life
this Orpheus had other work to do.
Singing miracles
a string magician
just a cover
for a first order holy of holies
masquerading as man
and she … who danced the naiads dance
waiting in the deep
for her curtain call…
The fret of the Orphic lyre
is un fingered now
as dipping head
navigates restless sea.
Decapitation brought him sympathy
from the Lesvian nursery
Orphykian maids
who would eventually enrapture themselves
with an other song.
Cursed by Apollo
who ordered the lilt of his lips to silence
(jealous father figure tantrum, Orphic complex – forget
Oedipus)
in later aeons
… oh woe
And with the split of head and heart
sinew and bone
his spirit wafted
re-joined the
sparkled
Milky Way
of Metisian creation
apostasy in reverse
for a royal adept
who sings and summons,
yet
profaned by mortal expectations
and the temptation of Eurydice
who remained virtuous
and paid the virgin goddess price
in common story
another woman out of the way.
He succumbed to maenad orgiastic lust
in this incarnation anyway
wasn’t expecting an actual mind body split
so harsh a representation
haunts the earth and its emissaries still
stitched up
by common concerns
just dramatic enough
to free him
so his soul could seep
into the ether
left to weather
and decree
… a whistling wind
while Eurydice
poor Eurydice ventured beneath
to hum a lonely song
in one telling
hostage and martyr
to a dark god
whose ills and wills
were assigned
by some other gods fall from grace.
Homer denies it
Hesiod murmurs it
and Eleusis and Bacchus
chant its masked duplicity
while the first Orpheus calls the world to pray
the first word
the first prayer
of a holy order
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BIO
Shé Hawke is an Australian cross-disciplinary scholar and award winning poet from the Department of Gender & Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research focus is the cross-cultural, myth/eological and environmental values of water. Her book Aquamorphia: Falling for Water (IP Press 2014) was nominated for the prestigious Miles Franklin Award. It is a poetic represention of her doctoral thesis: Aquamater: A Genealogy of the Impossible (2008) that rediscovers Greek Water Deity – Metis, and traces water through deep time and disciplinary fields
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Ilana Freedman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She received her Master’s in Comparative Literature from King’s College London in 2014. Her research interests include Modern Greek poetry, Interdisciplinary Hellenism, Greek Diaspora Studies, and Classical Reception Studies. She is the graduate coordinator of the Ludics Seminar and the Modern Greek Literature and Culture Seminar at the Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center, as well as the Cultural Politics Seminar at the Weatherhead Center for International Studies.
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Vassiliki Rapti holds a PhD in Comparative Literature with an Emphasis in Drama from Washington University in St. Louis (2006) and was Preceptor in Modern Greek at Harvard University during the years 2008-2016. She is currently Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College and Chair of the Ludics Seminar of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She founded the Advanced Training in Greek Poetry Translation and Performance Workshop, which she has run since then. Since January 2017 she is the Director of the International Translation Literary Committee of the multi-disciplinary electronic literary review Levure littéraire (France-Germany-USA). Her publications and research interests center upon literary theory, especially ludic theory and translation theory, comparative literature, women’s writing, cultural studies, and avant-garde theatre and performance, with an emphasis on Surrealism and classical reception studies.