From "Semele Recycled"But then your great voice rang out under the skiesmy name! -- and all those private namesfor the parts and places that had loved you best. And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung. The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar, and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment, and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles, and the runaway groom, and the fisherman's thirteen children, set up such a clamor, with their cries of "Miracle! "that our two bodies met like a thunderclapin midday-- right at the corner of that wretched fieldwith its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle. We fell in a heap on the compost heapand all our loving parts made love at once, while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyesand then went decently about their business. And here is is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the riverand are sweet and wholesome once more. We kneel side by side in the sand;we worship each other in whispers. But the inner parts remember fermenting hay, the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense, and passion, its bloody labor, its birth and rebirth and decay. . Carolyn Kizer
About This Quote

In Greek mythology, Semele was the daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia. She eloped with Zeus, the king of the gods. When Semele died in a fire during a thunderstorm, Zeus gave her a new life in a part of his body. Poseidon also was her husband and their son was Dionysus. The poem is about being reborn from a person's desire for something else by being together in love.

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  1. Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.
  2. From "Semele Recycled"But then your great voice rang out under the skiesmy name! -- and all those private namesfor the parts and places that had loved you best. And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung. The distraught old ladies chasing their lost...
  3. You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.
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