What Does Anyone Know About Goddesses?
Hestia runs a finger along spines:
Making a Home; and Domestic Duties, or,
Instructions to young married ladies; and this
one, The Young Housewife’s Counsellor and Friend.
No one would guess she values such compiled advice.
They think she was disgorged complete
with knowledge of how to create and keep,
an innate wisdom of the art, the science, of domesticity.
It serves their narrative to think she never
craves anything else, content to stay
home, mistress of neat, dame of orderly.
She’s agoraphobic, they whisper,
shy, a homebody. It’s no wonder
she never married. It’s just as well.
And if she were married and mortal,
they would say, it’s a woman’s place,
women by nature like their nests.
She hears them, and smiles to herself,
will not let anger rise within. Let them
think what they will. It matters not to her.
She sits keeper of the secret—that all good
homemakers build nests they thrill
to come home to after roaming alone
the dark wilds on moonlit nights.
