Taking time to read

I’m reading “Mother of the Gods  From Cybele to the Virgin Mary”.  Very academic and often over my head.  But occasionally I run into these chapters like Chapter 4 which describes the Romans adopting a foreign god because of fear of falling rocks in their region.  So they formally go to Pessinos, pick up a holy stone (which the author says was a meteorite) and bring it back with ceremony to Rome.  They have to find a chaste young man to accompany it, and it is turned over to the matrons of Rome.  Later, it’s incorporated into its own home in the statue of a woman/mother.  It’s a foreign goddess, but I guess that it solved the problem of falling rocks for them.  I say that it remained foreign because the worship of this particular goddess involved men castrating themselves--which the Romans abhorred.  How did the Romans make peace with such a practice?  It sounds like it was socially walled off; no Romans worshipped this goddess.  They imported the worshippers.  Mercenary worshippers!

This chapter also has a quote from a Roman:
“Let no one imagine, however, that I am not sensible that some of the Greek myths are useful to mankind, part of them explaining, as they do, the works of Nature by allegories, other being designed as a consolation for human misfortunes, some freeing the mind of its agitations and terrors…”

I never saw the Romans as being that clear minded about their religion.  That probably explains why it was so easy for them to make a late Emperor a god.  It was only politics.

RWP prompt #108

I am behind on the RWP site.  However I decided to go back to a poem that I started for #108.  It’s a shame to waste a start.  I might even try #109.  This week’s, #110, doesn’t sound appealing at all.

readwritepoem.org/blog/2010/01/01/read-write-prompt-108-a-mechanical-approach-by-matthew-zapruder/

The prompt was to take words from the dictionary using a pattern of one’s own.  I didn’t quite succeed, so I doubt that I will post my link on the site.  My “pattern” was I opened the book, picked a word at random and then decided that I should also choose another word using each letter of the chosen word. 

 

My word: surcharge

Supplemental words: serious, umbra, repair, crown, harm, amino, revolve, ground, enslave.

 

Poem follows:

Gym

 

Pain is an acceptable surcharge
on the forty-eight fifty that I already pay.
Pennies--just to sit in your umbra as you drag a steel cable over two pulleys.
Your shadow being the perfect place to watch the
gleam of metal plates that
rise
kiss the crown of the weight machine and
slide down with a sigh.
One set of twelve repetitions follow another;
your sweat fertilizes the carpet with amino.
I am only that girl on a stationary bike in the corner,
that bike that often needs repair.
My feet revolve perpetually around a hungry axle,
but I am seriously enslaved by this image:
your head of tousled hair bowed to the ground
your back arched
and the silver plates that rise at your command.