Grief Song for Pan

Pan is the wildness

Once captured by men as a trophy

Now trapped deep within the citadel

of civilization.

But this treasure, gleaming eyes peering out of a golden box

He still lives!

It is the hybrid, the deviant and feral,

Which brings novelty into culture

Yet its source is hidden, censored, enslaved.

Can it ever break free?

Or is that the wrong question

—must it instead always work from behind the scenes—

the secret face of everything?

Always profane and sacred both,

eternally condemned/blessed to the inscrutability of shadows

Is Pan, I wonder, the real martyr

The one whose blood* was spilled by the machine of kingdoms—the great divider of Nature?

*(but whose blood remains yet alive?)

His blood has percolated through the earth

And formed gems

They look like garnets

Red crystals dark and opaque,

like the soil,

destined for an endless succession

of now being buried, now being revealed.