McCook, NE – Kara Gall’s original song “Demeter Waiting,” a song that weaves in imagery from the Demeter/Persephone myth to express the endless waiting in times of drought, was selected to be published in May 2004 as part of a Buffalo Commons Storytelling Festival. The website collection, called Turning the Century” can be found at http://www.buffalocommons.org and is a collection of short stories, poems, songs and essays written about the life and times of people from southwest Nebraska, northwest Kansas and northeast Colorado by those living there, having lived there or about those who did.
Gall explores the great and terrible famine brought to earth by Demeter’s anger at Hades for stealing her daughter Persephone. She says, “Throughout the past six years of drought in Southwestern Nebraska, many of us have felt as though we were suffering at the hands of the gods … that a much larger force is at work…the anger of a god scorned.” As in much of her writing, Gall strives to capture the particular fate of women, in this case, farmer’s wives. “I was looking back to the time when I was a young girl. I can remember my own mother standing at the windowsill certain summers, looking defeated. The women stayed at home, tending the children, waiting, always waiting, and praying for the rain.”
You can view Demeter Waiting online at: http://www.buffalocommons.org/docs/smenu3/demeter-waiting.html
K Anand Gall 