THE BLOODY BRIDE DISCARDS HER VEIL!!!

That's how I feel after trying to get this blog up three times and somehow losing it. Hopefully this time. Thanks Karen for your support. And for doing the Vic Writers thing.

Geoffrey, I absolutely love your poem ; it has come up superbly.

Herewith 'The Bride....'

A poet friend had this to say about it recently - which you might find helpful.

'Don't be dispirited about your poem. I find it amazingly rich and I certainly think it has reach beyond yourself. The crunch lines seem to be about living in your husband's shadow and finding your own sweet air. I often put these decisive questions in my own poems and find people don't like them but I do think there is a place for the definitive as distinct from the evocative. The essentail dilemma is one I have often pondered - we need "the other" to really know ourselves but the other also inhibits and restricts us. How to live positively within and beyond these restrictions.'

Her comment helped me see that I am trying to write about retaining my creativity, ie, true self, within the restrictions of a relationship eg. my well has dried up/words drowned in cracked mud/how to shine, etc.

I've reworked it some more since our last workshop but this is the original. All suggestions appreciated.

ORIGINAL: A BRIDE DISCARDS HER VEIL MID-FLIGHT


The drought drags on. The country burns. Heat eats the colour from Arkley gardens, ivy strangles the banksia in the park and frangipanis flower too soon, confused.

My well has dried up. Words drowned in cracked mud.
Nothing except thoughts cut with razors, bloodied with love.

Late in the day a shabby sky threatens and wind whips a warning: hot rain sizzles on asphalt and teases parched earth. A pomegranate moon labours over the bay, heavy with ash from fires far away. The night sea shivers the skin of the deep: all this underneath.

I dream of a house with internal glass walls, a Louis chair, tasselled drapes, a hand-painted chest full of Manolo shoes: Marie Antoinette, celluloid queen. In the morning secret words forming, the poetry of dawn, voices calling: Let go. Let go. Let the little girl dance.

The empty beach.
A boat with one sail.
A lone pelican.

To the cliff where pink clouds wait with welcoming arms. To the cliff where my parachute fills with purple air, the pleasure. To the cliff where stairs lead down to soft sand and there is no need to leap.

So much that can’t be said.
So much mute suffering.
So many false beginnings.
.
Virginia said: But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world – a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

To the cliff where stairs lead down, where under the bower of a Kurrajong branch weighed down with pink flowers, a bride discards her veil mid-flight.

Marriage is meant to be more than a moon and circling star.
How to shine in his shadow? How to find my own sweet air?

After the Kurrajong flowers, prickly-haired pods protect the new seed.
After the pelican mates, the myth of a mother’s piety.
After the butterfly dies, goodbye hara kiri (said softly, softly), goodbye.

Said softly, softly: Let go. Let go. Let the little girl dance.

Smoke veils the setting sun, a slash of red, a severed limb.
In the half light, I water the garden. The cat rolls on dead grass, lavishly, lushly. I take secateurs and cut suckers from the flowering peach.
I listen to the whispering night.









Suzanne McCourt, January, 2007