Book 2 Canto VI: The Rapture of Dolores

I.
You were pure as a maiden in Love
In the centuries before the Prophet;
And we worshiped you as the first daughter of Earth.
What wisdom did you bring from the ether, when
The Prophet seduced you with a Pomegranate
In a garden where fruits have the spices of pain?

After a thousand years of sleep in the tomb of ice,
You returned to us with an insatiable fire
And the eyes of eternity. You are wiser than the world
In the ways of love, and have seen what was before
And what shall be.

The prick of thorns are the secret to passion,
And red petals give us scent for desire. The blood
As it trickles from the lips speaks softly
To the fingers, all the dreams of tomorrow that
We dare not to discover today.

II.
All changed, the loves that we knew,
As the four colors of the Earth;
And we were wrong to worship the Prophet
Who scorned you in the wilderness,
When He took you by the throat with vigorous hands.
Now we have learned that Love is the instrument of torture;
And only a woman knows a thousand ways to inflict pain;
Yet none of them require her touch.

Thirteen ways will you teach me love
With the tools of torture.
And I shall worship the infinite damnation in your eyes,
While my gaze remains transfixed as the universe.
Your hair is as the flames of hell, yet I am bound by a single strand. The heat of my embrace is quickly frozen in time by the blue in your veins.

It was Love that drove Man from Paradise
And gave you the power to redeem us from the virtue
Of a jealous Prophet.
Teach us your secrets, oh mystic Dolores, with a seed from the venomous Pomegranate; The fruit that dressed you in white
And raised you from the Dead;
Crowned you Queen over a world split into Four.
Show us that wisdom through each bruise on our flesh;
Each perilous kiss of the profane.