Page 8 - After Waterhouse

Psyche

Psyche collapses
here, in the gloaming, at the edge of worlds.
A fearful pulse fills her ears
mingles with memory

the shrill envy of sisters
the silence of her lost love
the incessant challenges of an embittered goddess.

Oil lamp still lit,
mauve windflowers waver at her feet
Psyche peers into the golden box
she’d risked everything

for this, to placate Aphrodite,
her habitual curiosity again her undoing,
she falls into a Stygian lethargy

which will be alleviated only by divine mercy.

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Psyche Opening the Golden Box, 1903 by John Williams Waterhouse