The Pomegranate Tree

The gods never punished us with death. They condemned us with the ability to look away.

But such a gift does not befall the gods themselves. And that, to me, seems unfathomable, for they dwell where we do, within the fragile scale of human experience, where fallibility is woven in; it is in this imperfection that they are stirred to life.

Perhaps from this very truth, the myth was born that Persephone descended to the Underworld herself, bore the weight of each agonizing step, not to be consumed by death, but to surrender to, and be embraced by, oblivion.

The one who, with the unfolding of spring and the adornment of life, left for the gates of death; who left her sorrows in the keeping of the branches, leaving them lamenting a whispered refrain, and, in return, left the world a rumination of her heartache.

Perhaps she thought the world that left her with a yawning chasm within her chest cruel. Torn and aching for the unnameable, without the consolation of ignorance.

And for that, she yielded her fate to the will of another, to be compelled to swallow the seed of forgetfulness, an exile of her own making.

Yet she still returned. Whether out of devotion to the earth, or because even oblivion refused to claim her sorrows, we shall never know.

And is there not a pomegranate tree within each of us, beneath whose branches we spend our lives deciding which seeds are worth swallowing?