You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World by Lucie Brock-Broido

You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World

 

 

Tell the truth I told me                                When I couldn’t speak.

 

Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship                Or a child

 

Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer 

 

In the 1930s                                       Toward the iron lung of polio.

 

According to the census I am unmarried                And unchurched.

 

                                    The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.

 

Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful

 

Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of  ice.

 

I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.

 

For whom left am I first?

 

                                                          We have come to terms with our Self

 

Like a marmoset getting out of  her Great Ape suit.