Poem

Every New Year’s Eve, my friend tells me she smashes six pomegranates on her lawn, and when I ask her why, she says it is because she is Greek, and when I want to understand more of what she means, I read up on pomegranates in Greek mythology, discovering that after Persephone was abducted by Hades and joined him in the underworld, her mother Demeter mourned by drying the Earth in a long, cold winter, until Zeus arranged for Persephone’s return, but because Persephone had been tricked into eating six pomegranate seeds, she had to return to Hades to spend every winter with him in the darkness, and I wonder if this is why my friend breaks pomegranates at night on her lawn, as if the more they break, the more their seeds are spread, and the more luck and fertility there will be in the New Year, which is not so different from my own superstition about my need to squeeze my eyedropper six times, never four, because my parents say four is an unlucky number, since the word for four in Chinese, Sì, sounds almost identical to the word for death, and the only difference is the level of inflection when pronounced, and it seems strange that the six seeds Persephone ate would have been so unlucky for her, but without her misfortune, there wouldn’t be new seasons to wish for, just as without the number four, I couldn’t learn to love the number six, and maybe that is why my friend and I aren’t so different as we seem— when she tells me about the pomegranate pulp in her yard, tiny seeds clinging to frozen blades of grass in the new January cold I have come to understand what she means. Sabrina Guo, 13 Oyster Bay, NY