October 2023 and all the Pomegranate fruits are dead. By dead, I mean eaten; devoured by a creature, perhaps bird, perhaps squirrel, perhaps Persephone herself. They hung on the tree, hollow and rotting. I picked them all — as if they’d been ripe — and peered into the basket. It seemed fitting that…

October 2023 and all the Pomegranate fruits are dead. By dead, I mean eaten; devoured by a creature, perhaps bird, perhaps squirrel, perhaps Persephone herself. They hung on the tree, hollow and rotting. I picked them all — as if they’d been ripe — and peered into the basket. It seemed fitting that the tree — which every year, for the past five years, has been burgeoning without incident — had been consumed. The fruits offering sustenance to something or someone else. Not me. Not…us.

The Cypress is an evergreen conifer tree with dense, scale-like leaves and ovoid cones. Native to the eastern Mediterranean, the Cypress is associated primarily with the gods Apollo, Artemis, and Hades. However, the most well-known myth of the Cypress is that of Kyparrisos, the youth who accidentally killed his favorite stag and, desiring to mourn forever, transformed into a Cypress tree. The tree is thus associated with grief and lamentation, and often found near burial grounds or entrances to the Underworld. As a sacred emblem of holding vigil, invite the Cypress into your ceremonies for grief, mourning, and lamenting that which has died