Farewell to Psyche

Farewell to Psyche Before dawn, I say, “Take this, Psyche, and become immortal.”¹ You lift the cup and drink. A last star trembles in the gold. Ambrosia shines upon your lip. I touch it with my thumb. You take my hand and hold it to your cheek. Dawn reaches us. Your wings fill slowly with light. Farewell. ——————————————————— Ψυχή (Psyche) Description of the Icon Psyche hovers above the fractured surface of the asteroid that bears her name.² Her bare feet remain just clear of the stone; her hands open gently towards the surrounding heavens. A broad gold nimbus encircles her head. Her ivory robe gathers into solemn, angular folds, while fine golden highlights follow the movement of her lapis-blue mantle. Her butterfly wings unfold in broad fields of blue, ivory and muted red, their structure traced with restrained golden lines. Stars and spiral galaxies inhabit a heaven suffused with worn gold. Below her, the asteroid’s imagined terrain breaks into dark mineral planes and silver-grey ridges touched with gilding. Subtle joints between wooden boards and a web of delicate cracks lend the panoramic panel the appearance of an ancient, cherished work. A jewelled border gathers woman, stone and sky into one luminous image. Read beside the poem, her hovering figure suggests the moment when tenderness becomes distance. The gold nimbus can be read as the immortality bestowed by the cup; her face remains the face of the woman the poet loves. The poem remembers her hand holding his against her cheek. The icon suspends her between the last touch and the first light, her wings open to the heavens. ——————————————————— Endnotes 1. “Take this, Psyche, and become immortal” renders “Sume, Psyche, et immortalis esto” in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, 6.23. Jupiter offers Psyche a cup of ambrosia, granting her immortality and declaring that her marriage to Cupid will endure forever. In this poem, the words pass to the poet: the ancient promise of eternal union becomes a gift offered at parting. The dawn and farewell belong to this reimagining. (thelatinlibrary.com⁠) 2. Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis discovered the asteroid on 17 March 1852 and named it after Psyche, the mortal woman who became immortal and married Eros, the Roman Cupid. Its designation, 16 Psyche, records its place as the sixteenth asteroid discovered. Her Greek name, Ψυχή, means “soul”: an ancient personification carried into the naming of a world between Mars and Jupiter. (science.nasa.gov⁠, logeion.uchicago.edu⁠) ——————————————————— © 2026 Witold Piotr Nowak.