Persephone

From "The Pomegranate" by Eavan Boland

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.


This is my mini-post for Persephone reading week. I am madly grading, somewhat mad-eyed and crazed in my demeanor. Last night I read a bit of The World That Was Ours--stolen time. Hilda Bernstein describes the insidious chipping away at civil liberties as the South African regime takes away rights, cordons off Soweto and other townships, and intimidates political activists. Bernstein tells of repeated raids, during which the police searched the Bernstein home, taking papers, periodicals, books:

"What did they do with the mountains of printed material? Having stripped our home year after year of political books and books that were not political, having removed countless copies of papers and magazines that were publicly and legally published, what had they ever learned from them, apart from the facts that had never been concealed in the first place? That we read a great deal and were interested in socialism?.....What did they do with all the books they took? And who...was concerned with Short Stories by Anton Chekhov, or A Dictionary of Quotations, or Women of Asia and Africa?"