- Hi Platform, I'm Nikita Gill,
and today I'm going to
be reading two poems
from my new book, "Great Goddesses".
Lessons from Hephaestus.
If hate is what made you,
how does one replace it with love?
You learn sweetness despite
being built of jealous commands.
You choose a different path
than your blood demands.
When no one aides you, you
build your own two legs.
You learn how to be needed
instead of the easiness of wanted.
And when the burning
inside your chest claws,
insults you as forgotten, hideous, unloved
every single night, you
learn how to create iron,
then a sword, and challenge
those demons to a fight.
Fifth Mortal Interlude: To the Poets.
I know why you did it,
turned your own wounds into
the stories of gods and heroes.
It's easier to picture the pain that way.
Turn it sweet so strangers
and even loved ones
who hear you do not
realize that when you say
this is the way Zeus betrayed Hera,
you are talking about how
your first love betrayed you.
And each of Heracles' 12 labors
is penance you paid for hurting people.
The truth is too painful to admit.
It is digging bodies from
a ground so unhallowed
you hesitate to call it memory.
It's better to touch it through
a veneer of sacred stories.
Name it Achilles, call it Helen,
christen it Megara or Patroclus,
as long as it makes you feel
holy, less human, less sullied.
At least it cannot harm you that way.
So this collection, as the title says,
is about great goddesses,
and it's empowering
stories about goddesses
and monsters and mortal women
and just the idea of finding
the divine inside yourself
and the hero inside you.
The first poem I read was
Lessons from Hephaestus.
And Hephaestus is one of my
favorite of the 12 Olympian gods
because I think that his story
was probably the harshest
and had so much more suffering
than any of the other gods.
So the story goes that Hera
gives birth to Hephaestus,
and she looks at him,
and because the gods can be quite shallow,
doesn't think that he's beautiful enough.
So she throws him off Olympus,
and during that fall he injures himself
and gets a disability.
But Hephaestus is probably the kindest
of all the Olympian gods,
which is why I wrote this
poem about Hephaestus.
Because the lesson that we learn from him
is always always find ways
around your suffering,
gain the best from them,
and build a better you in every way.
And that's what he does.
He literally builds himself his own legs.
How amazing is that?
So the second poem I read was
Fifth Mortal Interlude: To the Poets,
and this is actually
quite a personal piece.
And I think it, you know,
all of Greek mythology
has been told by poets,
so it's been told by Homer
and Pindar and Hesiod.
And it's basically
storytellers passing it down
to other storytellers in verse, right?
I think that all it was, basically,
was taking the archetypes of the gods
and trying to explain
away all of our own pain
and the pain that we go through.
And because it's so hard to go back
into our own memories and touch that pain,
we create these metaphors
and similes using the gods
and the stories of heroes.
And that's why I wrote
that particular poem
to explain away why poets do what they do.
The writing process for
this book, it was really,
it was really complicated
because it came to me in waves.
There would be days where
there were total dry spells
and I couldn't really write anything,
because those were the days
that I was doing a lot of reading.
So I was reading Madeline
Miller, and I read Stephen Fry,
and I read Hesiod, and I read Homer,
and I read a lot of Emily Wilson,
and I read some really great books,
the classics mixed with
some modern retellings.
And those stories basically then turned
into dreams and into
visions and into stories
and into these questions which I had asked
when I was very young when my mom used
to read Greek mythology out to me.
And I never really, I
never really went back
to those questions, so a lot of this book
is answering those questions to like,
say an eight-year-old Nikita
who was asking these questions
and going well, but, but,
but why did Hera stay with Zeus
when he was so mean to her?
But, but, why did like
Hera throw Hephaestus,
and what did that make him feel like?
Or you know, those questions
and answering those questions.
So the writing process was a lot of
putting down those questions
that I had when I was eight
and then finding ways to answer them.
So I love this illustration
because it's the idea
of Eurynome is the mother of all things
and she's dancing the
world and the universe
and the planets and everything alive
simply because she's
looking for places to dance.
So this is her bringing
to life all of creation.
Poetry is all about channeling
the most painful part of you
and kind of trying to turn
it into something beautiful,
taking moments that really affected you
and turning them into something beautiful.
Or maybe you do it the way that I do,
which is turn them into
stories and stories
that we know quite well and
retelling those stories.
Or maybe you do it in a very different way
which is a lot more personal to you.
But the only piece of
advice that I can give you
is don't be afraid to do it.
Don't be afraid to put the words down.
Don't be afraid to
touch those parts of you
and pull that verse out.
You never know what you can do
if you are just able
to be brave with that.
So "Great Goddesses" is out now.
The link is in the description.
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(soft ethereal music)
