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Taking Innocence (l962)
| Dark Poetry #1 |
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Taking Innocence (l962) |
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Martie
Moderator
Member Empyrean
since 1999-09-21
Posts 28049California 
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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 |
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| © Copyright 1999 Martie Odell Ingebretsen - All Rights Reserved | |||
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Temptress
Moderator
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-06-15
Posts 7136Mobile, AL |
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. |
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Martie
Moderator
Member Empyrean
since 1999-09-21
Posts 28049California |
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. |
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JennyLee Senior Member
since 1999-09-01
Posts 1461Northwestern, NJ. |
You did more than great putting those memories into this piece. Welcome,I look forward to reading more of your work!! Jenny Lee |
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Severn Member Rara Avis
since 1999-07-17
Posts 7704 |
hugs - and smart or not he was a coward... love you |
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