The Sun Who Hid

When that the world was young and gods still walked

among the rice and silkworms, freely talked,

there reigned a goddess bright above the rest,

Amaterasu, brightest and the best,

who wove the dawn each morning with her hands

and warmed with equal grace all living lands.

Her brother was a storm, unruly, wild,

Susanoo, more a tempest than a child,

who broke into her hall one bitter day

and flung a horse, skinned raw, into the fray,

and there her maiden, weaving by the loom,

was struck down dead within that very room.

Now what would you have done, had grief so cruel

come knocking, and no reason left to rule?

The goddess did what many since have done:

she took her sorrow and she took the sun,

and sealed herself inside a cave of stone,

and left the whole wide world to grieve alone.

No dawn came after. Crops dared not grow.

The rivers, once so quick, forgot to flow.

And every evil thing that fears the light

came creeping out to feast upon the night,

while all the gods of heaven, sick with dread,

gathered at her door and knelt and pled.

"Come out," they cried, "the fields are dying fast,"

but grief, once settled, wouldn't move so fast.

She heard their begging like low drizzling rain,

a distant sound too far to ease her pain,

and stayed exactly where her sorrow led,

alone, in dark, among the newly dead.

It took no speech to draw her out again.

It took a woman, bold beyond all men,

Ame-no-Uzume, who climbed a tub

and danced upon it like a drunk in pub,

stripped half her robes and stomped and spun and laughed

until the watching gods themselves went daft

with laughter loud as any autumn storm,

a sound so foreign, so unlike the norm

of mourning, that the goddess, curious still

despite herself, against her grieving will,

cracked open just a hair's width of the stone

to see what joy had found her all alone.

"Why laugh," she asked, "when I have hidden away?

What brighter sun could greet you at midday?"

They'd set a mirror facing toward the door,

and answered, "We have found one shining more,"

and she, not knowing it was her own face,

leaned closer to that bright, familiar place,

and closer still, until the gods behind

threw wide the stone and left no crack to find,

and hauled her out before she'd turned to flee,

back into sky, where she was meant to be.

So this is why, the old ones like to say,

the dawn still comes on cautious, half-delayed,

and checks the edges like it's searching for

the door it once retreated through before,

for even gods, once broken by a grief,

come back to light in doubt, and not belief.

Writer’s Bio

Gary is a poet whose work have appeared in The William & Mary Review, Icarus Collective, Cambridge Daily among others. He is a Best of the Net nominee and works as a diction and etiquette instructor.