Three Zoryas
Because the stars are without number,
because the stars are goddesses.
Morning, cloak us in your veil,
and better our steel and steed, over theirs.
Evening, close the gates behind us.
We be three sisters, hers and hers and hers.
Midnight, hold the sun in your arms
a little longer, though they blister.
Three hundred years of clotted Georgia,
stars to muck to blood to clay.
Three numberless stars shimmering
the predator’s love into his empty hands.
First, Middle and Last, safe-keep us
and our battleship-born generations of sisters
in struggle, injury and doom,
in forests, in starlight, in fog, in your hands.
© 2019 Katherine Williams
There’s something eerie about being one of three sisters, preceded by three sisters, preceded by three sisters (except the third one was born fifty years late, and couldn’t stay long.) All sorts of correspondences run through my next manuscript in threes.
Folkloric examples of three sisters are all over the place. The Hindi Tridevi and the Scandinavian Fates were triadic goddesses. To the Greeks, the three seasons were sisters, like the Fates; and to the Slavs and Celts (the author’s ancestral people), so were the Three Zoryas, who enacted the diurnal cycle, and by some accounts the Morrígna, who augured death and influenced wars. Stories about how the mythic combination of corn, beans, and squash arose in ancient times, to sustain generations of indigenous life across this continent, safeguard the tradition—come what may.
Eerie.
The author gratefully acknowledges publication of “Three Zoryas” in Spillway 27, Marsha de la O and Phil Taggart, Eds., Huntington Beach: Tebot Bach Press (2019)
