THE CULT OF DIONYSUS

Dionysus, blissfully,

Drunken, yet a sage,

Erected, like Hadrian,

A radiant temple for the global stage:

The ivory colonnades of the Parthenon,

That vast, Doric treasury,

The alabaster jewel of Hellas,

The embodiment of felicity,

Athena’s fair cella, gilded with the coins of Zeus.

For where did Pericles

Receive his Delian wage,

If not from the hands of Maenads

Whose gold and silver they found

From the flowing well-springs of the sacred ground,

From the fountains

Of wine,

From the fine,

White streams,

Which descend upon the Macedonian mountains,

Where bright, insane, fantastic dreams

Met with ecstatic wanderings.

And when grapes do sing

Their fragrant, minty strains

To Persephone who strolls

In the sunlit rains,

In the bowers of the spring

For rapturous hours,

With fair Dionysus

Who laughs among the melody of flowers,

Which wavering, glow in the gold

Of sun showers-

The wine-possessed

Resurrect the old!

And when young Dionysus

Was raised by Rhea,

After the Titans removed his head,

He grew to manhood

In the moonlit wood

Where the sky was painted by Zeus’ hand

With scarlet, carmine,

And a bold, lutescent, burgundy-red.

His spirit, effulgent, majestic, grand,

Emancipated with wine,

Mated with the ghosts

Of Thamatos,

With his own Semele,

And he raised them from the dead.

And as Simonides writes

Expansive and flowery, then concise and terse,

Weaving his florid, chiseled verse,

Euripides declares the nights

Sacred for plays

And wanton ways.

And Socrates, awake,

Likes to think of a moonbeam,

As the spinning, blue earth

Gives a miraculous birth

To another gold stream

Where the Maenads take

A drink and a dream.

 ~ John Lars Zwerenz