#national poetry day
Loving Medusa
And she looked Medusa in the eyes;
saw her not as a terrifying monster, but
just another powerful woman.
And she did not see stone.
Even as she stared, her hand reached
to touch Medusa’s face while she stood,
still as any statue she had ever made.
Whispered love in gentle traces of the tracks
her tears had run
so coarse with salt.
The snakes were quiet then.
Sheathed their fangs and curled into their coils
while Medusa wordlessly begged them to stay.
She saw fear again, then: that fear of being alone
without protection worn into Medusa’s statuesque face.
She buried her hands in her hair, then.
Stirred the snakes once more to quiet hissing
as they coursed through her tender fingers,
tongues flicking but mouths mostly closed.
Her thumb grazes Medusa’s cheek -
a blush follows its path like wildfire across a bone-dry prairie
and you smile.
Medusa’s red eyes dim, melt away,
leaving brown orbs behind.
Her head of snakes fades, hisses becoming the breathing of the wind
as long curls fall over her shoulders,
your hands still embedded in its length.
Her body softens, bends, bones crack like
exhale after held breath and she
falls into you.
You hold Medusa, and she holds you back.
You say nothing; you only listen gently
to the wind’s quiet talk and
the stone singing something about freedom.
Earlier on in the year before the lockdown, the national poetry day asked me to write something on the theme they had for 2020 which is “vision: see it like a poet” so wrote and recorded this at home.
I feel like if I had done this now after everything in the world had gone crazy it would be different but I still love this and stand by it!
Tawny Landscape by Emile Nelligan
On a high cliff where the horizon rose,
Stand the trees, like old men by rickets bent
Or damned souls under the whips of torment,
Twisting in despair their fantastic torsos.
It is Winter; it is Death; on Arctic snows,
Flogging their horses at a break-neck pace
To far-off camps where still their fires blaze,
The hunters ride, chill beneath their heavy clothes.
The north wind howls; it hails; night falls in gloom;
See how suddenly through the shadows loom
Savage packs of wolves, through starvation bold.
Stiff-legged they leap; in tawny swarms they rise,
And the stark horror of their burning eyes
Lights the white loneliness with sparks of gold .
“I loved you unconditionally, but you gave me so much in return. I loved you yet couldn’t make you happy, but you gifted me with hurt and sadness. You gave me loneliness, denial, chaos, guilt, regret and all the things I didn’t expect. It seems like you gave me more than I could’ve ever given to you and I only had love, which wasn’t good enough.”
— memoirsofbilal (via Instagram)
