poetry prompts and poem: "I Do Not Blame Susan"

[intrikate88]

Prompts time! I tag everyone who feels like writing, since, if you're on LJ, is basically all my flist. Feel free to be inspired to poetry, fic, original fiction, creative nonfiction... anything you want. And then post a comment and link me to it!

Prompts:

-growing down
-screaming in cathedrals
-she acts like a silent film
-never quite Eden
-her cigarette never goes out
-fell in love with a hurricane

For the 'growing down' prompt, I wrote a Narnia-inspired poem about Susan and the struggle to adjust to life as an adolescent girl, after having already grown up once.

 

I.

 

I do not blame Susan.

For who would leave a kingdom

to draw dark stocking lines on

backs of thighs for

dances with boys who never will

wrap fingers around sword’s hilt?

The queen was always queen in Narnia

but growing girls cannot continually

believe their crowns to be gold,

and do not understand desire:

their own or others'.

The woman embraced by

a man in a gaudy crown of shiny

childish river-stone collections

will shine her crown brighter

or

she will collect river-stones herself.

And the woman with a golden crown

anticipating years to come of boys with no sense

of metallurgy

or alchemy

or kissing-

what will that queen do?

 

II.

 

Queens do not reign here.

They are tabloid covers

or men in tasteless dresses,

and since Susan would be neither she

puts her candor away

with her braids and all the other stylings of youth-

like gaudy gold crowns in a stony world.

Tiny black-haired woman

already grew up alone once,

no mother to explain how women count months;

now she can only count the days since she left home.

(This isn’t home?)

Even an invisible crown on an invisible queen

is no use;

for no one will bow or even notice.

Susan studies their eyes.

She knows she will again be a beloved queen:

for once a queen,

always a queen.

But a queen must understand her subjects, as Susan knows well.

 

III.

 

They pay her homage at the castle gates,

bringing her carriages and flowers.

Sometimes she feels discourteous for denying them the hospitality of her hall,

but her bed is a child’s bed,

too small to share.

Again: it has escaped her that

she is not that woman Rabadash pursued to Cair Paravel,

even if she can still feel the touch of his hand

and his wine-soaked breath upon her cheek.

Lucy,

perennially virgin,

does not know how to ask

why her sister studies her reflection,

searching for evidence of curves or crowns:

one of these, at least, will tell her if she is wanted

and why.

Susan knows the definition of irony:

she is fully aware how to grow a woman

but it is like studying a map of London

in the twisting closes of Edinburgh,

and her knowledge means nothing here. So

she spreads lipstick to mark her trail

to a destination she recalls

from another life.

 

IV.

 

Yes, blame Susan.

For who would give up the magic, the wonder,

for grasping young men who will never wrap fingers

around the hilt of a sword?

To linger behind for

saved-for silk stockings

and refuse the call so persistently echoing

in her siblings’ minds; Susan cannot,

will not

look back at her girlhood.

It never told her how she would

recover what she lost.

(Su Pevensie was never as lovely

as the reflections of Queen Susan the Gentle: another

fault she will never forgive her youth for.  

Queen Susan, however,

need never have existed.)

After Narnia, she had

never played at being a woman-

Her only pretense had been

hiding inside a girl’s small body

as if she could even remember when

she was small enough to fit.

 

V.

 

Peter watches her, she knows,

but she refuses to know

how here he is still High King

since she suspects it is because he is looking

down on her.

With high heels, she meets

his eyes and wonders

if maybe she is wrong.

She will not return to

the games of childhood,

since it is only the games of adults

(careful frauds though they be)

which garner even a tiny bit of the respect she once enjoyed,

and childhood games leave

the worst skinned knees

on women who attempt to play them.

Or men, or sisters,

who get on trains to find those games.

When for the first time since forever

no one knows she is a queen

Susan finds herself tired of womanhood

and knows she is finally free to fade, if so she wishes.

In her stores of girlish hoarding

lie a horn and dusty crown;

no one needs them shined and ready.

So I do not blame Susan,

who never wished to fall so hard from wardrobe door

to dull wooden floor

and then drew lines up backs of thighs

to dance with boys throughout the nights

who never would grasp hilt of sword

or wonder if there was anything more

to the dark-haired beauty clasped in their arms,

who would long in those moments to be just a girl

never queen in a world

she can never forget

or quite regain yet.

Comments

[ninamazing.livejournal.com]

Oooh, lord, I love your poem. And I've taken forever to comment because I was trying to think of lots of intelligent things to say about it, but I am still to exhausted to do that, and I figure the most important thing is that I comment and say: Lord, I love your poem.

♥

(Do you read Goblin Fruit? I think it's amazing, and I also think you should totally be submitting to them because I could see you in their internet pages.)

[intrikate88.livejournal.com]

I have been reading Goblin Fruit obsessively all morning. THANK YOU for pointing me that direction, and I certainly want to submit. It looks like submissions open up 9 October, so I'm making a note of it in my planner. :)

Thank you for such lovely comments on my poem! I am glad that you like it; I was pleasantly surprised to also get some very thoughtful comments on it over at fanfiction.net too, so it makes me pleased. Tertulia, the open mic night for my magazine, is coming up soon and I think that will be one of the poems I read then. I want to read it at Java Monkey downtown... only there is basically no gas in Atlanta area and so I don't think I'll be making frivolous drives for awhile.