“Our Creator contritely comprehends
that the ancient story of Genesis
once retold through a patriarchal lens,
has become women’s patient nemesis …
Despite Eve’s fleeting transgressing,
our Eternal Lord, lovingly present
still deems the Daughters of Eve a blessing,
rendering orders their harmers repent!
Harsh is the shared punishment God shall pass
upon misogynistic marauders
for sadistic, wartime sins they amass
raping and torturing wives and daughters …
Let they who abuse women in God’s name
live a lonely, celibate life of shame!”
E. V. “Beth” Wyler grew up in Elmont, NY. At 43, she obtained her associate’s degree from Bergen Community College. She and her husband, Richard, share their empty Fair Lawn, NJ nest with 3 cats and a beta fish. Her oldest daughter is a biomedical engineer and her other two children are SUNY undergraduate students. E. V. Wyler’s poetry has been published in: The Storyteller, Feelings of the Heart, WestWard Quarterly, The Pink Chameleon, Nuthouse Magazine, The Rotary Dial, and on the website Poetry Soup. In addition, 3 accepted poems are pending publication in Vox Poetica.
Ms. Wyler’s English sonnet, “Daughters of Eve,” is a dense concoction of meters, abundant alliteration, and plush diction, reminiscent of Victorian poets Swinburne and Hopkins. In her fourteen lines of ten syllables each, she forcefully argues against the abuse of women. Throughout the poem, she mainly uses various pentameter lines; but in the final line of the octave, where she evinces the severity of the crime of which she speaks, she surprisingly utilizes a dactylic tetrameter, the ardour of which is echoed by the final defiant cry in the couplet. In her seething metrical mixture, I was surprised to find no iambic pentameter; indeed, the first lines of the opening quatrain are all trochees.