The Sacred King

We are just past the height of the grain harvest celebration, but I thought I'd put in a poem that came up in one of my 3:15's two years ago... Death of the Sacred King (see Frazer's The Golden Bough) for the sake of continuing harvest in the year to come... I must also cite a youthful fascination with Mary Renault's mid-20th century fiction, The King Must Die and The Last of the Wine. Wherever my l'il peabrain got it's subterranean idea, this is what it came up with at 3:15 am, August 1, 2004:

The Corn King awakes…
knowing.
Bread he takes
in cool palms.
Its taste furrows
his tongue.
The last of the wine:
water in his throat.
Relentless light
greets the grain knife…
knowing.
They throng slopes,
fallow places resting from
last year’s yield.
Down through
olive groves above the sea
comes the Corn King,
bedecked,
to kneel before his queen.
His sight seeks
glittering scythe she
lifts.
And then, before
that sunstruck arc, he
bends his white neck:

Knowing.

***********

I hunted and hunted for actual evidence of this sacrificial regicide - and, indeed, regicide has been rampant. The sacrifice of king for harvest, however, seems to be more mythic than historic, as most vital human archetypal images are. The concept gathers bits from here and there until we have an extravaganza with mega-sound. At any rate - the king, old John Barleycorn, is dying to make fertile ground for next year's harvest. I don't intend to let that sacrifice go to waste. Make bread, not war!