by Sydney Tan, PsyD

I wish to tell of bodies changed into new forms.
You, gods, who bring about these changes,
bless my undertaking, and bring out my song, unbroken,
from the world’s first origins to my own time.
Before the land and sea, and the sky which covers all,
there was nature throughout the world, what we call chaos:
an unformed, disorganized shapeless mass, nothing
but confused, discordant objects thrown together.
As yet no light shone forth upon the world,
nor had the crescent moon renewed her horns,
not yet did the earth hang balanced by her own weight,
suspended in the surrounding air, nor had the ocean
stretched out her arms along the far edges of the shores.
And though there was land and sea and air,
it was unstable land, the seas were not swimmable,
and the air was dark. Not one thing retained form,
and all objects obscured one another:
for within one body cold conflicted with hot, wet with dry,
soft with hard, and weight with weightless things.
                     —Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated from the Latin by Sydney Tan