Portrait in Stained Glass of Persephone Engineering Her Own Escape

- after “Persephone” (2015) by Judith Schaechter

Here, it isn’t winter yet, though the spiked 
leaf of the holly is its herald. Among the dry 

rattle-pods and hairless weeds, a single 
blood-red stem sends its network of roots 

into the earth, a system interrupted 
by cells of dormant seeds: crimson 

and indigo, ending in the hollow where 
she is trapped or where, depending on how 

you’d like to retell her story, she prepares 
to break through that ceiling. She’s not 

too far away from the surface: it looks 
as though she only needs to give one last 

firm push with her left foot against a ledge 
of rock in her enclosure, and she might stand, 

clearing the blurry border between above 
and below with a shower of soil and loamy 

gravel. Except now she must do it alone: 
the mother is nowhere in the picture, and 

neither is the infamous lord of her abduction. 
Only one insistent flower tethers her to 

this world, and neither of them lets go.