Prudence Primrose

詩集Poems

Saturnalia

13 August 2025

There once was a time, under Saturn's reign1, mountain tops and frozen ice, mammoth bones, and raging fires2, look into the fire above the well below, this garden, the womb of my people, from this hive millennia of action and reaction, the wheel turns, and it goes, and it goes, yet it always returns, treading different land yet that Saturnian spike returned to its rightful throne, under the protection of the Sky Father3, the paradise within nothingness, that microcosm of creation, surrounded all around by certain death, yet death that must be traversed if one truly wants to flourish and grow, to hunt for mammoths, the great microcosm of truth.

Oh little oasis in this frozen hell, do you remember me? When I look upon your peaks, I see within mine eye the peaks I have been searching for, in your jagged peaks the sigil which I have been looking for so long is found, will you remember me? The peaks form a key, finally I see. Will you allow me to drink from your well once more?

Now that you have returned what is to become? We cannot know, we cannot know, who could have predicted this chain of causality, who we once were, and thus now who we have become. The ancient is the contemporary and a new age does not draw near, no, it has arrived. Will you remember me? Will you remember my love? Will you remember my goodness? Will you remember my tears? Will you remember my anger, my grief, my trauma? Will you remember how we frolicked, in those ancient days blurred by Saturnalian hue.

Do you see me through the smoke of my incense, can you see me through the smoke of your glacial bonfire? As I huddle up for warmth do you as well? Are you here with me now? Has it always been so? What has once been will thus become again.4 It goes, and it goes, and it goes, and it goes.

Oh the songs we used to sing, oh the joy we once shared, under that eternal blue sky. How we sang, how we danced, how we drank with merry mirth and fancy.

How things were easier yet behind it all a force of unknown magnitude, sitting, watching, staring, is it staring at me now? Does it rest its gaze upon me? Art thou from the waters, or dost thou come from beyonder? Oh this Garden, this cycle of ease. I shall see to the return of thy Saturnian breeze5, till next we meet.

-Yours truly

Notes

By the editor.

  1. Saturnalia was held on 17 December and in time ran to about a week. Macrobius, the main source, describes Saturn's reign as plenty before society split into slave and free. At the feast slaves dined like their masters and could speak freely, what Horace called “December liberty,” and the god's statue had its feet unbound from wool, a sign of liberation. source ↩
  2. Ice Age people really did live among mammoth bone. At Mezhyrich in central Ukraine, about 15,000 years ago, hunters built four huts out of 149 mammoth bones. The poem imagines the golden age as that world, hard and cold, with fire at the centre. source ↩
  3. Sky Father is the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European god Dyēus ph₂tḗr, “father daylight,” whose name survives in Greek Zeus Patēr, Vedic Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́ and Roman Jupiter. Scholars call him the most securely reconstructed deity of the Indo-European pantheon, and likely a witness to oaths more than a storm-king. source ↩
  4. Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV) says the same of history: “there is no new thing under the sun.” The poem agrees that what was comes again, but not with its weariness, since for her the return is the hope. source ↩
  5. Virgil's Fourth Eclogue (about 40 BC) announces that the golden age is coming back: redeunt Saturnia regna, “the Saturnian kingdoms return.” Coins of the Roman usurper Carausius carry the initials RSR for that line. Her closing vow, to see to the return, is a pledge to do what the Romans only hoped for. source ↩