poem offering
Jun. 26th, 2003 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThanks to everyone for congratulations and excitement about the Spectrum Awards thing. Warm fuzzies to you all.
Since you're not going to get anything sharp, trenchant, or beautiful out of me tonight, I'm offering up a poem I read this afternoon, because it made me vibrate the way good poetry does, and because it makes me think of Laurel Winter's excellent YA novel, Growing Wings. (Yes, Laurie's a friend, but the book is damn good regardless.)
[It also reminds me, in a much more nebulous and tangential way, of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pegkerr's The Wild Swans. Or what would happen if Laurie's book and Peg's book got pureed together in a blender. And I apologize for that image. --Ed.]
Lisel Mueller, "After Whistler"
There are girls who should have been swans.
At birth their feathers are burned;
their human skins never fit.
When the other children
line up on the side of the sun,
they will choose the moon,
that precious aberration.
They are the daughters mothers
worry about. All summer,
dressed in gauze, they flicker
inside the shaded house,
drawn to the mirror, where their eyes,
two languid moths, hang dreaming.
It's winter they wait for, the first snowfall
with the steady interior hum
only they can hear;
they stretch their arms, as if they were wounded,
toward the bandages of snow.
Briefly, the world is theirs
in its perfect frailty.
from Second Language: Poems, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
Since you're not going to get anything sharp, trenchant, or beautiful out of me tonight, I'm offering up a poem I read this afternoon, because it made me vibrate the way good poetry does, and because it makes me think of Laurel Winter's excellent YA novel, Growing Wings. (Yes, Laurie's a friend, but the book is damn good regardless.)
[It also reminds me, in a much more nebulous and tangential way, of
pegkerr's The Wild Swans. Or what would happen if Laurie's book and Peg's book got pureed together in a blender. And I apologize for that image. --Ed.]Lisel Mueller, "After Whistler"
There are girls who should have been swans.
At birth their feathers are burned;
their human skins never fit.
When the other children
line up on the side of the sun,
they will choose the moon,
that precious aberration.
They are the daughters mothers
worry about. All summer,
dressed in gauze, they flicker
inside the shaded house,
drawn to the mirror, where their eyes,
two languid moths, hang dreaming.
It's winter they wait for, the first snowfall
with the steady interior hum
only they can hear;
they stretch their arms, as if they were wounded,
toward the bandages of snow.
Briefly, the world is theirs
in its perfect frailty.
from Second Language: Poems, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
