Strange that the self’s continuum should outlast <br />The Virgin, Aphrodite, and the Mourning Mother, <br />All loves and griefs, successive deities <br />That hold their kingdom in the human breast. <br />Abandoned by the gods, woman with an ageing body <br />That half remembers the Annunciation <br />The passion and the travail and the grief <br />That wore the mask of my humanity, <br />I marvel at the soul’s indifference. <br />For in her theatre the play is done, <br />The tears are shed; the actors, the immortals <br />In their ceaseless manifestation, elsewhere gone, <br />And I who have been Virgin and Aphrodite, <br />The mourning Isis and the queen of corn <br />Wait for the last mummer, dread Persephone <br />To dance my dust at last into the tomb.<br /><br />Kathleen Jessie Raine<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/transit-of-the-gods/
