Shattered Head / I was Judith all along

Martyna Rogacka


I was Judith all along 


My father forced me to kiss him on the lips

don't bite don't bite raspberry juice

flowing down the tiles. 

Panties had to turn red eventually

I was never going to be a boy now

he has other favorite children.


I grew into a beautiful female although 

I had thoughts sharp as a razor

invisible to the naked eye – you can’t

draw conclusions from fat constellations.


I tried to pierce big words through their dreamy eyes 

“I will lick you here, show me what you like” I am

a murmuring brook, silent snake 

gliding on the bones I am

rumbling of the dead.


In the end, in the shade of a poplar, 

I gave birth to another woman.

Red hands dug us out 

fished us out of time before they gnarled.

When I tell her bedtime stories 

I don’t skip burnt bodies, gray hairs 

growing in black fields.


I want her to think of herself 

as embodiment of impossible love

when I sharpen the ax, chop the wood

take splinters out of fingertips.

The words that leaked from me stealthily 

can finally soak into the ground, there

the heads are planted. Patiently 

we wait for spring.

 

 

...and also polish version of the poem:

 

Od początku byłam Judytą 


Ojciec zmusił mnie żebym pocałowała go w usta

nie gryź nie gryź sok malinowy 

spłynął po kafelkach.

Majtki musiały zrobić się czerwone

już nigdy nie miałam być chłopcem teraz

ma inne ulubione dzieci.


Wyrosłam na piękną samicę chociaż miałam myśli 

ostre jak brzytwa, niewidoczne dla gołego oka –

z konstelacji tłuszczu nie wyciągniesz wniosków.


Próbowałam przebić wielkie słowa przez rozmarzone oczy 

“Poliżę cię tutaj, pokaż mi jak lubisz” jestem 

szemraniem strumyka, niemym

wężem sunącym po kościach 

rzężeniem umarłego.


Na końcu, w cieniu topoli, urodziłam 

kolejną kobietę.

Czerwone ręce wykopały nas 

wyłowiły z czasu zanim zgrzybiały.

Kiedy opowiadam jej bajkę na dobranoc

mówię o pogorzeliskach ciał, siwych włosach

muskających czarne pola.


Chcę żeby myślała o sobie 

jako ucieleśnieniu niemożliwej miłości

kiedy ostrzę siekierę, rąbię drewno

wyjmuję drzazgi z opuszków palców.

Słowa, które wyciekały ze mnie ukradkiem

wsiąkają w końcu w ziemię, tam 

posadziłam ich głowy. Cierpliwie 

czekamy na wiosnę.

 

 

                                        Judith slaying Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi, 1614–18

 


                                            Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi, 1610

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to this course (Topics on North-American Studies: Ecopoetics of Alterity / Forms of Environmental Justice

Image
  We will study ecology, poetics, others, and kin(d), and more... For now, as you read Donna Haraway's "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin" (2015), start researching, and (dis)entangling some concepts! Also, take 13 min to watch  this video  . The first writing prompt, as this is a processual course, is for you to dare share some of your notes (marginalia to Haraway's text or/and your impressions on the video), using the comment box,  in order to kickstart a class discussion.
Read more

For the class of September 27th: The Environmental Imagination of Thoreau's Walden (and Emerson's Nature)

Image
 These are the reading prompts for you to comment on the texts for this week (with lovely pic of Margarida in Walden pond at the bottom!). You can choose one of the questions, or weave more than one into a commentary. 1.Compare Gary Snyder's "Wave" with Thoreau's "Walden" (poem). Which of them seems more eccentric? Why? 2.  Lawrence Buell, in the intro to  The Environmental Imagination  (1999), refers to "literature's capacity for articulating the non-human environment" (10). Do Emerson and (or) Thoreau achieve these goals? In what (different) ways? 3.. Buell also posits, in pp. 7-8, four ingredients that should comprise the more ecocentric texts... Can you pick up from the  Walden  excerpts parts that exemplify such ingredients, and briefly analyse them? 4. Write a short text analysis of the passage, on pp. 2127-28, that begins "The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high" and ends with "we may turn over a new leaf a...
Read more

Reading prompts for the class of October 25

Image
  1. Sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself. (..). That is very much the image of the rhizome, prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation. Because the thought of errantry is also the thought of what is relative, the thing relayed as well as the thing related. The thought of errantry is a poetics…The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation  (Edouard Glissan, Poetics of Relation , trans. Betsy Wing, 1997 [1990],   18) Both Sylvia Plath's "The Elm" and Adrienne Rich's "Shattered Head" are complicated poems. They seem to aim at reaching "an-other's language", or speaking "through the other", but they also preclude the possibility of easy/direct relations. In what ways does the use of language in these poems thwart identitary representation? What effort do they place on the reader? 2.   How can Steve Mentz's theoretical approach to the O...
Read more