#napowrimo2023 #day16 #harpiesspeech

 

#napowrimo2023
#day16

#harpiesspeech

#poetrysnorthwest

The harpies’ speech*

This is the one speech no one

would like to forget: the speech

that is avoidable.

The speech that frees women

to surrender onboard as individuals,

uneven, blind to swollen, fleshy feet.

the speech everybody forgets

because no one who has seen it

is alive and similarly, equally, can be obliviated.

I won’t listen to your revelations,

and if I won’t, I reluctantly cede you

into these skinned cat rags!

I don't enjoy it here

squatting on this island

looking grotesque but pedestrian.

with no scaled, sane persons,

I do despise your speech,

singular, nonfatal and worthless.

I won’t listen to your revelations,

to me, never to me.

Go away.  This speech

is a whisper for hurt: Hurt you!

Never me, never may I,

be exceptionally unremarkable

at no time. Thankfully

it is not an interesting speech

redundant, yet it never fails.

Today’s prompt is a poem of negation – yes (or maybe, no), we were challenged to write a poem that involves describing something in terms of what it is not, or not like. For example, if you chose a whale as the topic of your poem, you might have lines like “It does not settle down in trees at night, cooing/Nor will it fit in your hand.”

I was a little off prompt today, my friend @trinitypoet is writing her dissertation and one of the poets she is writing about is Margaret Atwood and the poem Siren Song and it got me thinking what would be you describe a siren's song in opposition?  I got Harpies' speech, so I did this to the entire poem and loved how it turned out.

Here's Margaret Atwood's original Siren Song.