The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 1/5/08

"Letters from Persephone"

This is for the left-handed mothers
in their fringed black shawls or flowered housecoats
of the 'forties, their pink mule slippers,
their fingers, painted red or splay-knuckled
that played the piano formerly.

I know about your houseplants
that always died, about your spread
thighs roped down and split
between, and afterwards
that struggle of amputees
under a hospital sheet that passed
for sex and was never mentioned,
your invalid mothers, your boredom,
the enraged sheen of your floors;
I know about your fathers
who wanted sons.

These are the sons
you pronounced with your bodies,
the only words you could
be expected to say,
these flesh stutters.
No wonder this one
is nearly mute, flinches when touched,
is afraid of caves
and this one threw himself at a train
so he could feel his own heartbeat
once anyway; and this one
touched his own baby gently
he thought, and it came undone;
and this one enters the trussed bodies
of women as if spitting.

I know you cry at night
and they do, and they are looking for you.

They wash up here, I get
this piece or that. It's a blood
puzzle.

It's not your fault
either, but I can't fix it.

—Margaret Atwood

Can never have too much atwood...

thanks

:hug:

RL

:evilgrin:

and about Persephone:

In Greek mythology, Persephone was the Queen of the Underworld, the Kore or young maiden, and the parthenogenic daughter of Demeter—and, in later Classical myths, a daughter of Demeter and Zeus, in the Olympian version she also becomes the consort of Hades when he becomes the deity that governs the underworld.

more at link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persephone