Talking to Demeter Late at Night

Come wrinkled crone, corn mother. Sit.
Let us mourn lost daughters:
their coriander faces white as ice;
their honeysuckle breath lost on the frozen wind.
Loose your witchcraft wrath
and blight the green earth black.
I want my stolen daughters back:
their pretty lips wound close around the pomegranate;
their winsome tongues still rolling shifty seeds.
My emptied womb cries woe
and woe and woe and woe
for sly things done and said and shown,
for brittle husks, for hardened grains,
the threshing floor, and gone
my dainty girls, so full of hope,
and still more woe
and broken hands that cannot sow nor reap.