Recently, I've been making my way through the Mabinogion, and am re-writing the tales in poetic form. My aim is to lend a voice to the voiceless. Please expect more poems as they are finished. This is inspired by Blodeuwedd- who, quite suitably given last week's post, is also the inspiration behind my current Dungeons and Dragons character. Please, look her story up. All my stars, Char.
Flowers by Night
You wanted a woman in the shape of this land, all homely and bountiful. Rough and ruddy, Always ready. Beautiful because of that roughness. Enchanted by the hills, and incensed with freshness from the morning dew. And so you made me. Your Pygmalion Posy Nurtured by your manhandled magic, Formed through the flowers of these valleys Forced to grow in just the way you wanted me. Primrose for youth- How could your wife be a child to you? Oak for fertility- Someone stable, able to endure her days alone, and nights being seen through your eyes. Meadowsweet for beauty and peace- Obviously. What else could I be? Broom for abundance and strength- Not that I'd ever be expected to use it, but still. You made a mistake with that last one, do you get that now? Because do you know the thing I realised? About this thing you'd done in making me? You're a coward. I had never known love, romantic experience, a thought or heartfelt emotion before I knew you. What gave you a right to make me feel those things? I am more like a child, yet you use me as I labour, completely lost in your emotions. How did you not expect me to wander off when you left me so alone? Before you made me with flowers, All petals and pollen and empathy.
Pathetic.
You could never find a real woman to be there for you in the way you wanted me to be.
Yet instead of changing yourself, you blamed an entire sex.
I wish that I'd strangled you in your sleep.
Maybe then I'd have succeeded.
Every night you sneezed in my face.
'You are so beautiful, so contagious, I cannot control it'
Then you rolled over,
blew out the candle.
I wiped the gunk away from my eyes, untangled it from my hair in the dark.
You never even noticed me alone in my fragrance.
I could not accept that.
Even if you were my creator, this destiny you constructed for me was a thing I refused to tolerate.
And if my liberation required your eternal incarceration between the grass and earth's core, so be it.
You should have remained earth, like me.
I do not regret it. How could I?
You hadn't afforded me the capacity for such hard emotions.
You never even thought to do so.
And yet you call me callous.
Even in my punishment you were thoughtless, lending me feathers and flight, and forbiddance from showing myself to the sun.
Most hated of all the birds.
I can't help but laugh at that. When given all the capacity in the world to ruin me, your idea of a fate worse than death was what? To give me freedom from the sight of men?
Oh how little you know of the night.
It is cool here, and the darkness lets me shine brighter than I ever have before.
Here I have the freedom to wander. To cry. To think and write
And through writing thus I curse you eternally to be as you were before we met,
You will have no name
Nor power to fight against me
And no women shall love you because of these words.
You shall remain nameless, knobless, impotent man in poetic. pathetic form.
Because now I make myself.
I am a fucking firecracker
And I refuse to be burnt out by the likes of you.
Image Credits to the wonderfully witchy Sara Pocher.
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