Under a Wild Green Fig Tree

I am going to eat seven pomegranate seeds
and lie down under a wild green fig tree
in a field that has been ploughed three times

because I want to sleep in fertile soil
sinking into dream time, dream space,
and slip past the door to the underworld,

which has been left ajar for questers
and adepts, for reckless night revelers
stumbling into the corridor of ghosts,

so I can wander the subterranean realm
and listen to Persephone’s hell songs,
music she could learn only in Hades—

the low, fateful lyrics of death,
the soul’s radical return to innocence,
the earth’s eternal movement and passage,

our deep human labor to become spirits,
our almost vegetal need to be reborn,
the cycle of loss, myth of regeneration.

 --Edward Hirsch