Listen. If you get plowed up by God, what do you want to bet it hurts? If you get used as fertile ground, do you get to have your name in lights? What about my fame and fortune? Shit.
My New Role
God has plowed me up,
I am furrowed now, seeded,
and feel the stirrings,
rootlets stabbing me
in their search for food and drink.
This is my new role.
May 12, 2009 11:41 PM
Contraction
1 week ago
I wrote this a couple months ago...never finished or refined it, but similar head space perhaps.
ReplyDeleteI wonder at sacrifice
what gain for me
but to watch
they who gather
treasures
from a broken womans limbs.
Gallows of my choice
noosed with need
splayed from beating
legs wrenched wide
I spill
and they gather
in the crook of their shirts
they scoop as their own
frantic to collect penny candy
never looking up
to the shell
bleeding
The poem suggests the ploughing (note the $5 spelling) happened recently. Even implies it might only happen once. My experiences with Jahweh is that ploughing occurs regularly; alternatively (again, notice the different Brit word) it happens once, at about age three, and just as the scab is about to form reploughing occurs - giving the fallacious impression of a once-only event. I hope this is clear.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Annie. This is a woman's perspective for sure. Many of the women in my life seem to have versions of this complicated engagement with the world. It feels like rape to me in a way. I expect actual abuse when I hear it expressed. For this I am sad.
ReplyDeleteBB, I think I wrote it the way you took it, as a one time thing, meaning all the other times don't necessarily feel like being overturned, broken apart and planted with seeds of the new thing independent of me or my intentions. The poem was written as it was dated, nearly a year ago, and I imagine I had a specific change in mind as a model. I don't remember what it may have been now and this could be conceivably any rather large change. Perhaps I was referring to the heart attack event that had just happened. Not every movement of Apollo, or Artemis, or Zeus, or Jahweh, or Lilith, or coyote, not every movement holds the same quality for me.
ReplyDeleteI keep killing Buddhas and they keep on coming down the road.
:D
Thanks for your comment. I love your viewpoints though I probably twist everything all up. This is an issue when Brits and Yanks think they know how to speak English together.
I see it as a cycle, growth and regrowth appropriate for the planting season. I also don't see the narrator as soil. I feel that I have been plowed up from the field as a rock or an old root. Perhaps something to be discarded or even some forgotten treasure.
ReplyDeleteWelcome, Tag, and you are right. You can see the poem that way. I think that's pretty cool, since it it works rather well and I never thought of it. Meaning slips in sideways if you leave big enough holes in your self will.
ReplyDeleteKinda funny this.....I feel this way when life seems to be starting anew, as it is now.
ReplyDeleteI don't have the words for poetry right now, I am very glad you do xxx
The rape analogy sometimes makes me cranky....not every furrowing of the soul is forced, and sometimes it is welcome in spite of the seeming violence. Change is not a bad thing....perhaps I read it wrong. Or perhaps there is no wrong :)
ReplyDeleteMichelle, I am very glad to have your comments. It gives my heart ease to know you are fine, starting anew.
ReplyDeleteI think attitude is a great deal of things. When the furrowing is inevitable or at least so strongly determined of forces set in motion by my own hand too long ago and/or with too complex a causation, then I may call it "rape" though it is not.
I don't want to over analyze all this. BB pointed out that he thought of this experience in multiple. I was writing of the really big ones that may be counted on one hand throughout life if we are lucky. Tag pointed out that you could look at this like a natural event or a major war, you so small and the plow so large (plough?) that the furrow is not in you but around you.
When I was nearly busted for drugs early in 1972 it seemed to contain all these elements, inside and outside causes, so many and so large that the situation was personal in some ways and impersonal in others. I was completely in a war zone, very close to survival thinking while suspecting it might be that nothing I did at this point would make any difference at all. It was very much a matter of marshalling divine power to avert the doom. I called in all my chips, cashed in my life, knowing that it had to be all of it, stopped drugs and began a completely different life abruptly, taking the loss directly and personally in order to avoid the drug bust and it's possible consequence.
The aftermath was of course a quiet life with booze, a daily drunk for eleven years that started very shortly after things settled down.
I was referring to Annie's poem when I suggested that it felt like a description of rape. If I had referred specifically to my 1972 experience I would have called it as bad as that but not perhaps rape.
Everyone knows that some rapes are self determined, invited to some extent though in a legal context it is very difficult to determine all that, and anyway the agression in a rape is always something to abhor. We tend to prosecute because we must if it is possible. This is very much like no fault insurance where the situation is always interpreted in a certain way regardless of variations in the story because the litigation is otherwise too expensive.