Pearls

Today being a Wednesday and neither a major holiday nor appreciably on the far edge of a semester, we had our weekly WordCrafters meeting in the LSC library. Despite showing up early enough to trawl through the stacks after vowing to NOT CHECK OUT ANY MORE BOOKS UNTIL I FINISH THE ONES I HAVE and immediately thereafter checking out a new stack of books, I was looking forward to this week's meeting.

Carrie (our sponsor, leader, and exemplar of following a project through to completion) had decided that our prompt this week should be in honor of Barbara Bush. It feels like I've spent a good deal of the past year in a negative headspace--alternately cynical and fatalistic--and I'd just read a book praising Dryden's rational, civic poetry, so the idea of writing a piece specifically against my own mood and in praise of a woman whom I only knew from the news stories and as a namesake for a local library, a rational, civic response to a prompt.

The prompt draft ended up as follows:

Let us remember dignity goes with strength;
Congruence between monument and woman
Shines like an harmonic angel sings--struck
By deed unforced, voice beaming the horizon.

It's not a great poem. How can I get at the monumental quality of a woman who was a figurehead, like Princess Diana, like Audrey Hepburn--women who walked into the glare of the cameras to drag a tide of glances over people and situations in need of the attention. It doesn't require perfection to do so and I'm not arguing for any of that. We don't write hero's tales in which women catch hold of nets and drag them trailing behind them to gather up a town and draw it to the place it has ignored. We write fables about how we learn to ignore or walk away.

It's easy to do so. It would be easy for me to do. The longer I look at this, the more I want to. What can I do with it? Orphan piece of little polishing, voice of myself as else--not disowned but not properly owned, like the image of a woman whom I'd never thought that much on, truly, until reminded of virtues by others.

But then again, that's a monument. That's a fable. That's a moral.