“Today, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, I got to stand on a mainstage and perform.
Eurydice Dixon won’t ever get to perform on stage again, because her life and talent and promise were ripped away from her.
Here is the poem I wrote for her and read at Beyond Festival 2018.” Erin Martine Sessions
– – –
Two Eurydices
You were named after a daughter of Apollo.
She was shy, like you, and she lived in the hollow
of an oak tree. She was capricious and callow,
like you, and when the music called, she followed.
But a stranger spied her like a hunter and gave chase.
She took flight through the wheat stalks, but stepped on a snake.
It sunk teeth into skin, sending her to Hades.
Her husband sang so mournfully at the gates
of hell, that even the furies wept. They let him
bring her back from the dead with his music
and she danced along to the land of the living
but when he turned to look at her, she was missing.
You were a stand-up with more than a few good laughs
who walked home from a gig through Princes Park.
You couldn’t know that routine would be your last.
Women should be able to walk home after dark.
The biting irony is your name, Eurydice,
means ‘wide justice’. Your life was taken too early;
in one of, count them, sixty-three attacks.
If only we could play a song to bring you back.