You know what time it is
Apr. 9th, 2008 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
megwritesIt's poetry time, kids. So pull up an interweb and let me seduce you with my poetic wares.
Victimology
By: Meg Freeman
I thought one day to tell about
the darkness that I had
churned up, word by word
so it would liquify and pass through
my permeable membranes and out
no more to saturate me
Needing to tell the tale true,
I sought a notion of measure
and all measure requires scale
So I went to you.
I waited until I knew you
would undress and peeking in
your window, I watched you
unbuttoning your shirt
until the white veil slid down
your back and revealed
the true parameters of what
I was dealing with
Quickly I covered myself
and hid my mouth behind stunned
restraining hands,
knowing that I now had lost
all right and reason to cry out
Who was I to sing a sorrowful song
when my few little wounds
barely scuff marks on my skin
have gone flat and white
while yours were still bulging outwards
ragged, red, a proud topography
of a truer suffering than mine
and a map of a rocky country
with chains of scar tissue mountains
that cast long, heavy shadows
over your skin
This was not a land I had
ever found myself exiled to.
I was just some illegal alien who
once skirted it's borders
and suddenly fancied myself an expatriot
Smartly, I think, I kept my hands pressed
over my lips, guarding against letting
any fugutive utterance of justification
or embarrasing attempts at compatriotism.
There was nothing to do but lock the gates and
learn the fine, fine art of dealing
with the dusty remnants of my
thoughtless little storm, where I
had gone through and headlessly
turned up old dirt and well flattened earth
All that was left for me to do was to
press things down again as
far as they would go
I did not, though I felt parching shame,
ask you to cover yourself.
You have paid in red gold and dark debts
and salt-money for the right to fly
your flag highest and have none to
usurp your high, high place
Yoked to humility, I sat quietly
for a long, long time. Contemplating
how best to keep quiet and keep contained
And I wondered then
how utterly guilty the unblemished must feel.
....
In my quest to rehabilitate myself to poetry, I've been reading up on those wot are far better at this than I am. This week has been reading up on Plath, Hughes, Cummings, Eliot, Sexton, and Rich.
And I just found out some things about Anne Sexton that make me hesitant to read her work ever again, because I know I'm going to read it with a decidedly hostile slant. Which sucks, because I really liked "Her Kind".
I think next week is going to be Greco-Roman poets. Not that as a bunch they were any nicer than the group I'm reading up on now, but frankly, after years of Latin and Classics nothing Roman can shock me. Four years of damnably inventive sodomy and emperors appointing their horses to the senate (*) and I'm all yawns.
(*) Why yes, there is a joke about horses (or the asses thereof) being in the Senate somewhere in there. I'm glad you noticed, too.
Victimology
By: Meg Freeman
I thought one day to tell about
the darkness that I had
churned up, word by word
so it would liquify and pass through
my permeable membranes and out
no more to saturate me
Needing to tell the tale true,
I sought a notion of measure
and all measure requires scale
So I went to you.
I waited until I knew you
would undress and peeking in
your window, I watched you
unbuttoning your shirt
until the white veil slid down
your back and revealed
the true parameters of what
I was dealing with
Quickly I covered myself
and hid my mouth behind stunned
restraining hands,
knowing that I now had lost
all right and reason to cry out
Who was I to sing a sorrowful song
when my few little wounds
barely scuff marks on my skin
have gone flat and white
while yours were still bulging outwards
ragged, red, a proud topography
of a truer suffering than mine
and a map of a rocky country
with chains of scar tissue mountains
that cast long, heavy shadows
over your skin
This was not a land I had
ever found myself exiled to.
I was just some illegal alien who
once skirted it's borders
and suddenly fancied myself an expatriot
Smartly, I think, I kept my hands pressed
over my lips, guarding against letting
any fugutive utterance of justification
or embarrasing attempts at compatriotism.
There was nothing to do but lock the gates and
learn the fine, fine art of dealing
with the dusty remnants of my
thoughtless little storm, where I
had gone through and headlessly
turned up old dirt and well flattened earth
All that was left for me to do was to
press things down again as
far as they would go
I did not, though I felt parching shame,
ask you to cover yourself.
You have paid in red gold and dark debts
and salt-money for the right to fly
your flag highest and have none to
usurp your high, high place
Yoked to humility, I sat quietly
for a long, long time. Contemplating
how best to keep quiet and keep contained
And I wondered then
how utterly guilty the unblemished must feel.
....
In my quest to rehabilitate myself to poetry, I've been reading up on those wot are far better at this than I am. This week has been reading up on Plath, Hughes, Cummings, Eliot, Sexton, and Rich.
And I just found out some things about Anne Sexton that make me hesitant to read her work ever again, because I know I'm going to read it with a decidedly hostile slant. Which sucks, because I really liked "Her Kind".
I think next week is going to be Greco-Roman poets. Not that as a bunch they were any nicer than the group I'm reading up on now, but frankly, after years of Latin and Classics nothing Roman can shock me. Four years of damnably inventive sodomy and emperors appointing their horses to the senate (*) and I'm all yawns.
(*) Why yes, there is a joke about horses (or the asses thereof) being in the Senate somewhere in there. I'm glad you noticed, too.
