The Way Youth Yields to Old Age
There is nothing so faithless as
a girl left on her own among other
green and growing things. Brimming
with life, carelessly killing the field’s
flowering army so she can wear
ribbons of bluebells in her hair,
she has no need of forgiveness
or prayer, no sense of life’s fraying
hem. She has no idea she’s dancing
over death’s own head, bare feet
knocking at his soil door until he rises
hungry from the pit, the field a gaping
maw, his sudden hand a vise
on her ankle, and she falls. Landing
in a heap, tangled in her own long
hair, trapped between his body
and the earth, she looks up and now
finds the need for faith. Now
she believes. Now she prays.
When the dark hand of a god slips
up your skirt, how is a girl to say no?
_______________
Colleen S. Harris
Review by Debra Kaufman
Wow–this poem grabbed me immediately and would not let me go. It starts as a kind of meditation on the carelessness of youth, a pastoral scene. The girl who wears “ribbons of bluebells in her hair” has “no sense of life’s fraying/hem.” The line breaks throughout are effective and the music trippingly carries the reader along to a surprising twist. Not a yielding to old age but a sudden and violent fall, this is a dark fairy tale, a kind of cautionary tale like “Little Red Riding Hood.” The insistent lines once she’s grabbed by the dark forces, “Now/she believes. Now she prays,” lead us to the pitiless conclusion.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
There on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds / Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke, / When down her weedy trophies and herself / Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up; / Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds, / As one incapable of her own distress, / Or like a creature native and indued / Unto that element. But long it could not be / Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death. (Hamlet, Act 4.7)
What begins as idyllic becomes ominous, but that’s not quite the picture here.
The girl’s carefree destruction of the field’s flowering army is not just a naïve gesture, but a signal, an embryo of a larger sacrificial cycle.
From one atheism to another: from an image blissfully god-free, where beauty feeds on beauty, to one where God stalks his victims. The girl will pay for her vanity. The flowers will wither. Her innocence, spoiled. And here’s the rub: if God is terror, retribution, predation, then it can’t be godly, but manmade. Another ring in the daisy chain.