edaumer

Juvenilia, published in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (2005) Eve walked in the Garden of a Sunday morning, Sunlight was her kirtle and her book a rose— Where was she going, down the aisle of trees so primly? No one knows. Helen in her bower looked into her dressing-glass, (Although of course the mirror was not invented yet,) What did she think as she preened herself for Paris? The songs forget. Vivien was subtle by the age-old oak tree, But that Merlin the enchanter was her dupe, I doubt, What did she do when he loosed the magic bondage? [...]

Published in The Gates (1976) When this hand is gone to earth, this writing hand and the paper beneath it, long gone, and the words on the paper forgotten, and the breath that slowly curls around earth with its old spoken words gone into lives unborn and they too gone to earth— and their memory, memory of any of these gone, and all who remembered them absorbed in air and dirt, words, earth, breeze over the oceans, all these now other, there may as in the past be something left, some artifact.   This pen.   Will it tell my? [...]