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Apocalypse Women
The Christians gather at the baby’s grave.
There are no tall stones in the children’s field.
Red scarves veil women’s heads among the crowd
And one, eyes streaming with a grief unhealed,
Turns toward us, mouth wide open in her cry,
Her full-throat wail. The veil of years is torn.
The modern world flaps loose and flies away.
It’s not her baby, this time, dead unborn,
But she’s been rocked again by age-old woe
That will not be denied. We stood apart.
And I’ll go home, take off my veil of black,
And hug my own. But walls have fallen now.
A village lost bursts from the world we knew.
And none of us are, ever, going back.
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Monika Cooper is an American family woman.
Thank you for this sensitive, economically expressed reflection. So true that grief lies dormant, rather than disappearing, and can be awakened at any time; also that sharing such a deep human emotion can create a permanent bond between people. I especially like the veil motif and image.
Thank you, Bruce, for reading and for your comment. The veil is an important symbol in the poem as you’ve picked up. For a woman, putting on a veil can be an occasion of scales falling from her eyes and illusions being torn away.
Monika, I am elated to read your nicely rhymed poem and saddened by the condition of the decadent hellbent society you so aptly and preciously describe.
Thank you, Roy. I don’t always use it but I love rhyme and I think there’s no magic like a poem in which the rhymes are woven deep, enmeshed with the meaning. But that is a rare gift.
Monika, this is a beautiful poem in which you have skillfully sketched both outer (visual and auditory) and inner, emotional scenery, for a powerful effect.
Thank you, Cynthia. It is weird that in my inner perception of the scene I do not hear that “full-throat wail,” I only see it.
No words. This is so moving and beautiful.
Thank you, Rohini. I am glad it touched you.
Monika, this is a quietly emphatic insistence on truths that an increasing portion of our world tries to shout down. The thicker the shield, the heavier.
The poem might be termed a sonnet. If one thinks of it that way, it is maybe more a broken one than a loose one; in other words, it seems you are evoking the sonnet, in inviting the reader to compare the on-off (ABCB etc.) rhymes here with the “classical” Petrarchan and Elizabethan forms. (Look what’s been done to the “baby.”)
Thank you for this somber beauty.
Thank you for your comment, Julian, especially: “The thicker the shield, the heavier.” Yes, this is a kind of sonnet, and I’ve been using this rhymed and blank line pattern for them quite a bit lately. It is a compromise of sorts and we all make them although we probably all dream of a poem without compromises. Maybe such things exist but at the very least there are poems in which the compromises cease to matter, become indispensable features.
It’s a sonnet xaxa xbxb xxcxxc, where x indicates an unrhymed line. This is a long-established rhyming technique often used in other lyric forms. Monika uses it here to show the shape and proportion of a sonnet, with the turn coming dramatically at the words “dead unborn.” They refer to what is mildly called “pregnancy loss” today. Monika may mean to include the early death of a born baby and/or grief over an abortion, but miscarriage and stillbirth have been the largely unacknowledged griefs of women for all of history. The title “Apocalypse Women” speaks of the tearing of veils (and falling of walls) between women who have had this experience, and even includes those who have not, but have heard of it from others. Often telling another woman is the only means available of working through the grief–which never goes away. The time scale here is apocalyptic, as indicated by the references to the modern world flying away and a lost village bursting forth. Monika, this is a poem of tremendous power.
Thank you so much, Margaret, and especially for your insight into the hidden world of maternal grief my poem sought to pull the veil away from, if only for a glimpse. The wailing woman, not one of the chief mourners, surely had some grief of her own that may have been private before that re-opening at the funeral. Perhaps no one is ever told anyone else’s story but we sometimes find our stories and our griefs in each other’s. And it’s a marvelous exchange; it doesn’t take a village to raise a child (not in the Hillary Clinton sense anyway) but it does take a village to allow for that exchange and in this case, it took a village to bury one. The funeral made the village visible and brought it into sharper and fuller existence.
Monika —
A powerful, painterly image. You know how to paint with words.
Ah, thank you, Sally. Since reading your book, I’ve been thinking so much about synesthesia. Like ambidexterity, it seems to be an extraordinary and rare gift, but also one that can be developed in people not initially highly gifted with it. It seems to me that the seeds of many talents lie undeveloped in many, if not all, people. So sometimes I see a painting and I think: if I’d pursued painting, that’s how I would do it. I chose writing because of its low budget materials and lyric poetry because of its minimal demands on stamina. Maybe there’s a bit of poverty mindset there but we all have limits, chains to sing in, and the hope of an eternity for unfolding undertapped talents, in perfect liberty.
You Have a multi-faceted eye, which works in many directioins at once. While it may not work as synethesia does, still it czn produce similar results.
I am very glad I received my musical first, before any literary training or additions to to my vocabulary.
In this way, I had time to thoroughly investigate the symbolic content on one level, and add it to my lexicon of symbolic meaning. Sometimes, too much knowledge at once can liken itself to too much dessert at the end of a heavy meal.
On a personal note, I did a bit of Christmas shopping Saturday, which had a fringe benefit of some things for myself. Found a Teddy sweater which feels just like one of my Teddy Bears, a super-warm vest for the dead of winter, and slippers. The slipper store has been a lesson in unlikely occurrences. At first, I bought my size and rushed on, which resulted in things that were either too small or too large, Then realized size meant nothing; Just as in poetry, you have to try things on.
Once I caught on I was able to get much greater value for my money, circumventing people who had not yet caught on ! Talking with you is always worthwhile..
I can’t say that I understand every turn taken in this poem, but the cumulation of powerful line after powerful was utterly gripping. What I’m left with are feelings of shock and awe.
Thank you, C. B. Your reaction of “shock and awe” has allowed me to recover for myself some of the original impact of the moment I was writing about. It was the catalyst of many powerful things in my life and no doubt others, of which this poem may well be the least. But approach to the meaning restores the experience.
Dear friends, thank you all for reading and sharing your thoughts here! The scene in the poem is the funeral of a stillborn baby. (Miscarried and aborted babies almost never receive public funerals.) The speaker, with some others, stands somewhat apart from the scene, like the women “at a distance” from Calvary. The veil she is wearing though gives her a degree of solidarity with the mourners. Her wearing of a veil to the funeral, in deference to Christian custom, is what disposes her to see what she is given to see: the modern world with its sparkles, conveniences, and determined avoidance of pain, suffering, and death, stripped away like the illusion it was. She sees the “village” as if a vision from the past reared up before her but it is the bedrock reality of the human condition she is seeing: this valley of tears. (In another aspect, this same valley is called the valley of love and delight.) She has a choice to make: will she descend to the valley, make exodus from the modern world, and join the exchange of active love among the poor that is the essence of the lost village? The final line expresses her decision, as she speaks for the whole little group of those who originally “stood apart.”