Poezie

Pain Perdu

1 min lectură·15 august 2010

Mediu

Collapsed sideways amongst a mire

of tired bedcovers,

waiting for you to call,

and a swan breathed to life

by a flute\'s damp reed

making a mirror for my

matte-feathered prostration.

And now I am the swan,

and not linen-white or tamed,

but one of the wild black birds

that coast the eddies and snags

like dreary death barges,

their snouts alight with the tiny flames

of funeral lamps.

And the swan that I am

is not gliding gracefully

in the current macabre,

but is nearly-dead,

sprawled on its Victorian taffeta skirts,

its horrible neck twisted

in a dying kind of strangeness

amongst the sour sedges and worms.

I am not yet dead, but I am dying.

I am dying from a lump of spoiled bread

turned to lead in my slender throat:

a bland wadge of hopefulness,

wedged like a lump of loaf

cast aloft by a careless hand.

Whoever was it that told me

I shouldn\'t gorge on the scraps

thrown out onto the black ripples of the shore?

Oh, delicious poison!

Whoever said your leftovers,

delicious as they were,

could be a slow murder?

002.091

Philomena van Rijswijk. “Pain Perdu.” Atelier, Poezie.ro, https://poezie.ro/atelier/philomena-van-rijswijk/poezie/13950385/pain-perdu

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