Prayer to Ceres

Flaxen-haired Ceres, Your fine tresses wreathed with ears of wheat, why must your sacred rites inhibit our pleasures? Goddess, people everywhere praise your munificence. No other goddess so lavishes men and women with everything good. In earlier times the uncouth peasant never roasted grains of wheat, never knew a threshing floor, but oak trees, those first oracles, provided them with gruel. Acorns, tender roots and herbs made their meal then. Ceres first taught seeds to ripen in the fields, taught how to follow Her with scythe against their golden hair, first broke the oxen to yoke and reveal the fertile earth beneath its curved blade.