A Newly Named Deity, Fibromyalgia
The day opens its veins
at four in the morning.
Virgil guides a crowd
to ninth circle of Hell.
From those icy regions
he leads his followers to warmer climes
where philosophers and poets dwell.
Peripatetic Aristotle's students
say "Read the Master's Poetics",
and the Stoics with their legions
say "Do calisthenics".
Plato points above,
"pain is neither a number nor Idea.
Socrates chose the agony of hemlock
over the shame of exile.”
The accusations against Socrates
were initiated by a poet, Meletus.
Roman Ovid says: "Be patient and tough,
one day this pain will be useful to you".
Seneca adds:
"Pain is slight if opinion has added nothing to it;
...in thinking it slight, you will make it slight.
Everything depends on opinion.
It is according to opinion that we suffer.
A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is."
An impervious drum, invisible
demon with sounds of bells,
Our pain is named after Algea;
she tortures women, few men.
A newly named deity, Fibromyalgia,
she invades fibrous tissues,
no articulations, organs or bones.
Cloudy, sunshine or pouring rain
she has many female homes.
The proverbial tiresome guest
today and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Pain is my ghost writer,
pens these sombre lines
with no hint of sorrow.
Fibromyalgia is from the Latin fibra (fiber)and the Greek words myo (muscle)and algos (pain).
Algea (Ancient Greek: Ἄλγεα; singular: Ἄλγος Algos) is used by Hesiod in the plural as the personification of pain, both physical and mental.
Hypatia was a Greek mathematician. She was brutally assassinated under the Roman Empire, in a Christian Church.