1608 - Pythia

 

The Sunday Whirl presents twelve words for us to use in a creative writing piece.  

This weeks words are:

waves, slip, void, soul, restless, dark, chanting, flickering, pulse, chance, marble, fan

Pythia

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely.

You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

-- Henry David Thoreau

The fumes come in waves

From cracks in the rock.

Attendant priestesses chant,

Hypnotic, rhythmic, throbbing—

In time with the pulse of the oracle.

There, seated on a tripod,

In the moonlight, flickering,

The petitioners, restless, wait

For their answer. Is it war?

Do we chance our arm? Or not?

Lives are at stake. Fortunes.

She sits quietly, surrounded

By the protective and the anxious,

A reflective soul in a trance,

Her mind mingling with the divine.

Oblivious to those around her,

She slips in and out of their world,

Their concerns, the dark voids

Of their fears and ambitions.

Cloistered in her marble temple,

Where flickering torches dance on stone,

Her answers ripple through the empire,

Like shadows cast and then gone.

And so she sits. And thinks.

Surety brings ruin.

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