Elia Karra – Two Poems
Content Warning: dark themes, mentions of kidnapping, death
Kore
Sister, we
wait under the pyre of a
saffron sun
stone-silent, weeping
How foolish were we to think we
escaped the curse—or
is it tradition, threaded in
the loom of our fate
Man sees, man
takes, rips you from
your home, from
our home empty, the hearth
embers and coal,
the roof
crumbling marble, powder
snow on our peploi
Sister, we
wait under
eons, crowned with endless
moons, cradling
our yearning in our sternums
On Orpheus and Eurydice
We watch the gods birth
new stars, a golden lyre
embroidered in ink
Orpheus is dead, yet no
one mourns him,
only Eurydice in Tartarus,
the constellations shrouded
under her sky of soil
(it’s better this way, she says
she loves the man, not the strings)
This time, he doesn’t come for her
The gods have taken him
She curses them all
she curses him, too, knowing
had she been the one to look
for him in the abyss
she would pluck out her eyes
Elia Karra (she/they) is an author and filmmaker from Athens, Greece. Their work has appeared in HAD, The Daily Drunk, Crow & Cross Keys, and others. Visit eliakarra.com or say hi on Twitter at @eliakarra.
Artwork: Blue Sphinx Girl by Bethy Williams
Bethy Williams is an artist, an autodidact, an arrangement of information in spacetime, and a native and permanent resident of the Milky Way galaxy. She is the creator of the ongoing webcomic The Adventures of Siân and Errol (And Other Stories). She lives and works in Wilton, New Hampshire.