Sunday, December 20, 2009

Periodicity

WARNING: Men may find this a little confronting. Read at own risk.
(I think it's worth reading even if you do find it confronting.)


Periodicity

My friend declares
Being woman and virgin she
Takes small account of periodicity

And she is right.
Her days are calmly spent
For her sex-function is irrelevant.

But I whose life
Is monthly broke in twain
Must seek some sort of meaning in my pain.

Women, I say,
Are beautiful in change,
Remote, immortal, like the moon they range.

Or call my pain
A skirmish of the whole
Tremendous conflict between body and soul.

Meaning must lie,
Some beauty surely dwell
In the fierce depths and uttermost pits of hell.

Yet still I seek,
Month after month in vain,
Meaning and beauty in recurrent pain.

Lesbia Harford (1917)

3 comments:

  1. Hmm. I wasn't too confronted until I got to her name. Were her parents insane??!

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  2. Perhaps. I've been asking myself if words had different meanings 100 years ago. Don't think so though.

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  3. Mind you, the inhabitants of the Greek island of Lesbos are not happy that their collective name (Lesbian, like we are Australian) has become associated with female SSA due to the poetry of Sappho (a Lesbos native).

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