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Dark Poetry #1
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Martie
Moderator
Member Empyrean
since 1999-09-21
Posts 28049
California

0 posted 1999-09-21 07:09 PM


A certain gray quality
to that morning
pressed into my skin
held my steps back
prevented the perfect breath.

I could feel
it hitch there in my throat
as I tried not to taked it in fully,
but, of course, I had to breathe.
I couldn't just decide that today
I didn't like the quality
of the air
and choose not to.

The car whined
purred then choked,
a living thing,
cohort companion
in this agony of breathing.

She beside me,
red hair corking out the window
disturbing the air with exuberance
its fiery threads.
She knew the way
into this dark place.
Her story was locked,
my gaze not shifting her stillness
into telling.
In the tilt of her eyes
she knew the feel
of tangled ropes
battling in my bowels.

Into the streets of noisy faces
and the congestion of smells
like ripe sewage leaking into the air
cried a baby.
I held the small swelling
to protect it from the blaring horns
and poverty of empty faces
that insisted.
We squeezed past border guards
and brightly colored pedestrians
then I turned to question her face
and caught death naked
in her eyes.

A puppet
I followed her
to the cracked corner,
past the swollen silent buildings
past the glass tomb store fronts
into the white room.

Take me back
I begged
the silence of her back,
before that long night
of heavy breathing
and naked eyes,
back before I thought that being his
was all I wanted to be,
before our legs tangled
and he melted like warm honey.

In the white room I was
expecting to explode
onto the ceiling,
paint the white
sterile walls with the blood
of that blissful union,
wished to push
that careless creation
into pause,
'till I could be a mother
I whispered to the curved line
of my whomb.

She held my hand
in the fog that decended
on that day
that doomed the tiny
agony of life
glued to the central
core of me.

Then her freckled long fingers
trapped the beige flutter of mine
and she pulled me into the evening.

in her eyes

© Copyright 1999 Martie Odell Ingebretsen - All Rights Reserved
Temptress
Moderator
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-06-15
Posts 7136
Mobile, AL
1 posted 1999-09-23 03:17 AM


I don't know why this hasn't gotten a response yet. It is a very good poem. It is intriguing to me as far as subject, but cold the author please give me an explanation more in depth? I would like to understand more about this work.
Martie
Moderator
Member Empyrean
since 1999-09-21
Posts 28049
California
2 posted 1999-09-23 01:46 PM


Reply to Temptress:

In l962, I was 20, a college student, unmarried and pregnant. There wern't as many choices or options in those days--abortion was illegal and an unmarried pregnancy and single parenthood were not an option in my family. My boyfriend, "the man of my dreams" did not want to get married, but he did know someone who could take me to Mexico where, for a price, the pregnancy could be terminated. The poem was written not too long ago and is my memory of the day. It came back in such vivid sensory detail and poured out of me, when I hadn't really thought much about it for along time, just a ocassional pang. It had built up into this brightly colored regurgatation of feeling--thus the poem. The lines at the bottom of the poem are not mine. I don't know where they came from. Thanks for reading it and for your comments and interest.

JennyLee
Senior Member
since 1999-09-01
Posts 1461
Northwestern, NJ.
3 posted 1999-09-24 12:21 PM


You did more than great putting those memories into this piece. Welcome,I look
forward to reading more of your work!!

Jenny Lee

Severn
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-07-17
Posts 7704

4 posted 2002-08-20 07:22 PM


hugs - and smart or not he was a coward...

love you

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