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Poetry Please start one thread for your own poetry and just add to it! |
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“Party Dress for a First Born”
By Rita Dove Headless girl so ill at ease on the bed, I know, if you could, what you’re thinking of: nothing. I used to think that, too, whenever I sat down to a full plate or unwittingly stepped on an ant. When I ran to my mother, waiting radiant as a cornstalk at the edge of the field, nothing else mattered: the world stood still. Tonight men stride like elegant scissors across the lawn to the women arrayed there, petals waiting to loosen. When I step out, disguised in your blushing skin, they will nudge each other to get a peek and I will smile, all the while wishing them dead. Mother’s calling. Stand up: it will be our secret.
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--Riki Anne Wilchins Hold on to the lessons, let go of the pain. --Leslie Feinberg |
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Someone let me know that this poem seemed disturbing to her; valuing this person’s thoughts and assuming that a few others might feel similarly, I decided to elaborate a bit about the piece.
“Party Dress for a First Born” comes from Rita Dove’s Mother Love, a collection of poetry that focuses on the relationship between mothers and daughters. The poems, all sonnets, are written from the perspective of the mythological figures Demeter and Persephone. In Greek mythology, Persephone (the daughter) was abducted by Hades (from the underworld); Demeter (the mother) mourned for Persephone so much that Hades allows Persephone to periodically visit her mother—heralding the changing of the seasons. “Party Dress for a First Born” appears near the beginning of the myth, when Persephone is encountering adolescence—and striving to create a separate identity from her mother ("the world stood still" when the mother called--but now, the daughter is keeping "secret" desires). Whether or not a reader knows or doesn’t know that the poem is based on the Persephone/Demeter myth, I figured that the sense of adolescence—as both an erotic and violent stage—would surface; plus, I think the sounds and rhythm are pretty awesome within the poem… I hope no one was too ‘put off’ by the poem :-) Link/Scholarly source: Pat Righelato’s Understanding Rita Dove Quote:
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"The Last Time" by Marie Howe
(from What the Living Do, focusing on her brother's struggle with AIDS) The last time we had dinner together in a restraurant with white table clothes, he leaned forward and took my two hands in his and said, I'm going to die soon. I want you to know that. And I said, I think I do know. And he said, what surprises me is that you don't. And I said, I do. And he said, What? And I said, Know that you're going to die. And he said, No, I mean know that you are.
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You can’t change that system by just getting your own rights, tinkering with the engine and leaving. You have to take on the whole machine.
--Riki Anne Wilchins Hold on to the lessons, let go of the pain. --Leslie Feinberg |
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Variations on the Word Love
This is a word we use to plug holes with. It's the right size for those warm blanks in speech, for those red heart- shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts. Add lace and you can sell it. We insert it also in the one empty space on the printed form that comes with no instructions. There are whole magazines with not much in them but the word love, you can rub it all over your body and you can cook with it too. How do we know it isn't what goes on at the cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard? As for the weed- seedlings nosing their tough snouts up among the lettuces, they shout it. Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising their glittering knives in salute. Then there's the two of us. This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness. It's not love we don't wish to fall into, but that fear. this word is not enough but it will have to do. It's a single vowel in this metallic silence, a mouth that says O again and again in wonder and pain, a breath, a finger grip on a cliffside. You can hold on or let go. By Margaret Atwood |
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The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth. Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same. And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
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![]() Thanks for sharing Maria Howe's poem (The Last Time). PS/ I like your signature line quote, too. Quote:
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True Love
True love. Is it normal is it serious, is it practical? What does the world get from two people who exist in a world of their own? Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason, drawn randomly from millions but convinced it had to happen this way - in reward for what? For nothing. The light descends from nowhere. Why on these two and not on others? Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does. Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles, and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts. Look at the happy couple. Couldn't they at least try to hide it, fake a little depression for their friends' sake? Listen to them laughing - its an insult. The language they use - deceptively clear. And their little celebrations, rituals, the elaborate mutual routines - it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back! It's hard even to guess how far things might go if people start to follow their example. What could religion and poetry count on? What would be remembered? What renounced? Who'd want to stay within bounds? True love. Is it really necessary? Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence, like a scandal in Life's highest circles. Perfectly good children are born without its help. It couldn't populate the planet in a million years, it comes along so rarely. Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die. ~ Wislawa Szymborska-Wlodek (Kraków, Poland: July 2, 1923 - February 1, 2012)
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An Endearing Trait
The scatterbrain, is a little like, the patter of rain. Neither here, nor there, but everywhere. - Lang Leav ![]()
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Bequest.
You left me , sweet , two legacies,- A legacy of love A heavenly Father would content, Had He the offer of; You left me boundaries of pain Capacious as the sea , Between eternity and time , Your consciousness and me. Emily Dickinson
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