Catherine Anderson: Diana’s Arrow

How often I avoid the truth
even as it arrows my way,

sleek & unsubtle. Last summer
the city abandoned the public pool

I loved with its flowered filigree facing
Cedar Road, built before cities rose up

to spark their necessary fires, built when
a Black child who wanted to swim here

would have been barred from entering.
But that was the past, I told myself.

For months I watched the pool fade
away with the finches & lilac trees

until it turned stagnant, pigeon feathers
scumming the tiles. Whatever injustice

a long time ago can’t happen again,
I told myself. Nearby, I saw oak leaves

had settled like a helmet of ash on a statue
of Diana—protector of children,

women, all living things—the deity
whose arrow never misses.

You’d think she might have tired
of the chase, that she’d had

enough of human evasion, yet plucked
from her heavy quiver I could see

another arrow, one she would send to arc
the sky & pierce my heart until I got it.
 

Author’s Note:

Goddess of the hunt, Diana was revered by the Romans as the protector of living creatures, including mothers, children, animals, enslaved people, and young men. The site of the ancient goddess, quiver at her side, arrow drawn, in a contemporary space serves as a bridge from ancient times to modern day when conflicts of power continue to encroach upon vulnerable lives. It may be hard to think of this lovely goddess as a sharpshooter, but here she is aiming for the speaker’s naïve belief that racial injustice is a thing of the past. Working through the draft, I looked back at Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, where she describes a deity not only tender and protective but also aggressive. If figures from mythology and what they do are aspects of our consciousness, then in this poem, Diana’s aggressive arrow is the beginning of doubt, sent flying to question our presumptions. Less than ten years ago I remember that many of us working in nonprofits committed to anti-poverty work thought those who held racist beliefs would naturally die off and their ideas fade away. How wrong we were. In the neighborhood where I live is an old park set among trees and a swing set with nearby statues of two protecting gods. The park had been named for someone whose racist views were once either tolerated or ignored. Only recently did the board overseeing the park change the name. I am always startled by how long it takes us to realize a hard truth about our own culture. Reading the myths is one way to experience, however late, those hidden arrows of consciousness.

~

~~~~

Poem and author’s note: copyright 2024 Catherine Anderson. From The Classical Outlook 99.3 (2024).

Catherine Anderson’s fifth book of poetry, Afloat, won the 2025 Birdy Prize for Poetry with Meadowlark Press. She is the author of four other collections of poetry and a memoir. A native of Detroit and former Massachusetts resident, she now lives in Kansas City where she worked for twenty-two years with new immigrants and refugees to become skilled interpreters. 

 www.catherineanderson.uno