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One Sibyl Among Many

The tangled path I would soon

follow could never be forgotten.

Each stumble over roots hidden

by fallen leaves left a wound,

slowly healing to a scar.

Each prophecy that slipped

from between my teeth and cracked

open my lips reached the ears of

nonbelievers who went on their way

until they didn’t.

The children come

to me for bedtime stories. I reach

into the past, not the future for those.

My lullabies pierce though the dark

like the mockingbird’s song.

There’s nothing of the crow’s

caw or blue jay’s warning in them.

I tell them nothing of wooden horses

or warriors’ shields. I never name cities

I watched burn long before the attacks began.

 

 

 

 

I’ve always believed one good persona poem deserves another. So when the prompt at last night’s PIP (Poets in Practice, https://www.poetsinpractice.com/ ) meeting was Linda Pastan’s “Eve on Her Deathbed,” I felt invited to walk down the tangled path I would soon follow, but pushed back against trying to forget it. I also rejected the final bitterness of age.

 

One of the prompts Abigail Licad, host of PIP, suggested was to speak in the voice of another person of mythic proportions. Cassandra’s has been one of the most important stories to me: The prophet doomed never to be believed. To foretell the end of a civilization, slavery, and death at the hands of the enemy warrior’s wife and lover. . . .

 

A writer and educator in the group once labelled me a “chunker.” (I wanted to reject the label just on the sound of the word.) Chunking is a way of organizing new information or ideas into patterns. As I wrote, the lines fell into five-line units. Even the block of text that didn’t could be coaxed, for its own betterment, to do so. At first, I treated these as separate stanzas, but I wanted to maintain the sense of traveling down one continuous path. Long one stanza poem are one of my bugbears. A poet had better have a damned good reason for not allowing me to come up for air, especially when there is a transition that needs a thoughtful pause. In this case, staying on one path was important to the poem. Instead I indented the first line of a new unit, hoping to create the sense of a stumble forward.

 

The dangers of being a chunker include privileging pattern over thought. It is possible that my poems fail to reach the depth and breadth that they could. Searching for patterns distracts the writer’s attention from what is being said. The result can be anything from a tired trope to awkward confessions to revelations. There are strategies I employ to resist chunking: Treat the initial draft as a free write, rearrange the text in more than one way, or adopt a traditional form at the outset.

 

I felt awkward about extending Cassandra’s life. She becomes the storyteller, the crone. When I shared the draft, Abigail mentioned the Sibyl. In my memory, there were more than one of them. A bit of research, and Cassandra was returned to her tragic fate.

 

The voice in the piece was so powerful that it bled into today’s Mythology Salon.

 

 

 

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