#it hurt me to hear

HADES

It hurt me to hear my subjects—
nothing but ghosts, nothing
but gray husks—groaning aloud.

His songs that blended anguish
and desire made their brows furrow,
their placid faces lose all repose.

In my dark realm, music’s painful
as first light to sleeping eyes:
white line above black trees,
dawn’s chalk scraped across the board.

Gregory Orr, Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence (Copper Canyon Press, 2001)