Source: E Pluribus Unum: The Woman From Africa by Stuart Dean I am sharing both this post and also where I found it because both are filled with fascinating information about ancient history and how so much applies to our lives now.
literature
Variety is the Spice of Life
Here I go again taking classes. This one is Part III of the series on modern women poets taught by Lorraine Mejia-Green through the Story Circle Network. We read poems by a variety of women and use their works and related assignments for inspiration. This week features Julia Alvarez and even though I have already read all her novels, etc. and a book of prose poetry, the selected poems are new to me. It seems I always take a different route from a lot of the others enrolled in the class. The following show cases draft two of my first assignment:
I keep coming to this part
where I’m happy
95 per cent of the time.
It’s my story
dictated by
ME.
“Variety is the Spice of Life.”
Cliche?
Yes, but true.
Four marriages
Lovers-I lost count
Activist in “love” with
Che and other South American
Revolutionaries.
Feminist for forty years
Up to maybe four careers.
Big city apartments
Ranches
Old houses by the bay
Bricks with arched windows
A tree lined street.
Can I settle?
For what, with whom, where?
Variety is the Spice of Life.
True Love
“True Love. Is it normal…?”
Wislawa Szymborska
Who gets it?
Does it descend
like lightning
striking
only the lucky?
Is it a curse,
a blessing,
a gift?
Me, I’m clueless.
I think perhaps my parents had it.
I don’t.
Never had
or did I miss it,
the strike
the blinding?
Lust I understand.
True Love??
DEATH
I was afraid of revealing me, the essence of me. Who even, indeed, was I? My mother told me, when I started dating, to hide the essence of me, boys wouldn’t like it. Too smart; too aggressive; too full of myself; too intense; too serious; too burning inside strong; too adventuresome; too nasty a temper; too full of desire to feel, taste, see, learn; too much in love with a world of possibility. I took her advice, married a genius scientist, safe, timid, disadventurous. He liked me because I could shoot a bird off a wire hundreds of feet away. I time, we all died, him, me, the bird.
This piece was a finalist in a flash memoir contest.
Marriage
The following poem was chosen to be published in the Story Circle Network’s annual Anthology this past autumn. I submitted two flash memoir pieces, including the Spiders story on a previous post, as well as this poem. I was very surprised that this was the one chosen.
Marriage
I remember the time he touched my face, melting me.
I married him; my face slowly, inexorably froze.
writingontherim 