Dionysus

Beautiful Dionysus, fair-faced and strong shouldered! Curling hairs of auburn intertwined and tangled in the leaves of your grape-vine crown! What secrets the gods must bear, what a burden! Are we the unenlightened, who cannot see you for what you are? 

A drunkard, they say, a man of simple, earthly pleasure. Oh, how we'd wish, in our bitter mortal resentment. What is your chalice, held always aloft and offered to those who'd come to you, but the key to our own shackles? There is no wine in your cup, but a promise that overflows and falls to waste on the ground, for like the crippled we stumble in the dark at your feet, incapable of tasting the drops that fall. And yet you take us to your breast in comfort and offer solace, and place wine on our table instead. 

Poor surrogate for the blind! And yet we lap it until we are heady, and we mistake the mists in our own heads to be the nimbus clouds of the ethereal heavens men do pursue with endless ambition! And you sit and bide on your throne, beautiful thrice-born god, eyes half-hooded with pity at our ecstasy as your lips play a melody we cannot grasp on your simple flute. 

How long you have waited. How few have come. 

Did the women who came to you in your sacred grove and danced their savage dance know you? Did you hold them closest? In those moon-lit nights scented of sweat and savagery that was somehow sweet you released them from the burdens of this mortal world. Titles of mother, daughter, bride-to-be; hardship and chains your freed them from in your blessing of ecstasy. 

And there is liberation in animal savagery, in wine-glazed eyes. But how short-lived! You gave them but a taste, so long as they bided by you in the grove, surrendering unto your altar table what they believed to be their self, so that you might liberate them. How easy, how quick, the solution of wine! But it becomes its own shackle within time. 

He who will not be turned away, the wielder of the key, the nymph-nursed, the twice-horned, the night wanderer!  How lonely you must be. We search for you in the haze of drunkeness and are lost. You lift your light in the night and split apart the darkness, that we may find you and abide by you once again. 

What are grapes, but the promise of return? What is the chalice, but the womb which all things are made? What is wine, but the promise of freedom? The key that swings gently around your neck, in rhythm to your dance.