Enigmatic Energies

Lucca Daniel Green
17 August 2009

	Enigmatic energies, your prodigy calls.
	Do you not hear your charge? His yearning is tangible.
	His truth fades. Make known your light.
	Let fly the sacred sound, the ecstatic vibration.
	
	He seizes the ground, dreams stimulant within him.
	Oh, you fates! See your charge, this mortal: how
	he covets the flash, the clap, the release
	the celestial sigh, the reverberating silence--
	
	Come to him now, the progeny of this energy.
	Universe, be damned! Listen, now, for necessity of light.
	Heed the shuddering heavens and witness them come down.
	Follow closely: resurrection is consequent, inexorable.

Back in August of 2009 I was weeks away from restarting at Michigan State after a two year break from higher ed and after four years away from Michigan State after an especially disastrous first year fresh out of high school, from which my GPA was like a 1.3. I only got to go back because technically I never withdrew from MSU; so I was still in their system, I just hadn’t been active in four years (in between I’d transferred to Columbia College in Chicago for three semesters). I only had to fill out a short form to change my status back to Active, and I was back to school. A lucky break for sure, and like the only time not taking necessary actions has actually paid off.
Anyway, that August I was already planning to go back, but I had no idea what kind of program I wanted to get into. I kept thinking psychology, because that’s always been my fall back since I’m pretty good at reading people and can usually figure someone out from a brief conversation or even a mere encounter. But really, my point is mostly just that I hadn’t begun to think of the Greek mythic universe within the realm of my own life, which wouldn’t happen for another eight or nine years; so I hadn’t yet found a way to think about my way with words.
This poem revealed a much deeper significance when I went back through my old poems after I’d amassed a manuscript’s worth of what I call Muse Poems.

Check these out for three examples of my Muse Poems:

Who was ever accepted/with a research statement in verse?

On Ends, Follies, Ascension

The Dance Among Mountains

The difference between this earlier poem and the Muse Poems is only the names and identities I’d come to attach to the ‘enigmatic energies’ that had earlier escaped identification.
I will say, however, that I’d already been cherishing a wee bit of an obsession with Athena, like ever since in my early elementary school years. She was definitely already on my mind when I wrote this. As a teen I can remember lying in bed staring blankly at walls and ceilings, tearfully wishing there were such a thing as Athena and that she would come pull me from the wreckage of my early life. (The argument is easily made that she did, that she has been: “‘Silly thing,…I am everywhere’,” like she says in “The Dance among Mountains.”)

Recent Poems