Names are secret sharers.
Think of plants, think of myths:
iris, hyacinth, narcissus.
Consider agave, not a usual suspect,
with its tooth-edged leaves, sharper than a serpent,
hardy as a cactus, source of hemp and mescal,
rope and fever dreams.
Agave, daughter of Cadmus, joined those tough girls,
the maenads, in a soap opera clash of gods and mortal kings.
In this episode, Pentheus of Thebes, son of Agave, bans worship
of Dionysus, his cousin. Big mistake, messing with a god
whose followers are raving mad. To make a long story short,
one night Pentheus gets lured into the woods, where maenads
tear him apart. Agave, thinking he's a lion, rips off his head.
No happy ending when she later realizes what she's done,
mother killing son.
A tragic mistake? But they had a word for it:
sparagmos, to dismember a live human sacrifice.
Brutal bunch, those old Greeks. Mayhem to the max.
If you touch agave's fleshy leaves, wear gloves.
Pat Tompkins is an editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems have appeared most recently in the Aurorean, red lights, and Astropoetica.