Undoing Penelope
©May 13th, 2017
By Vijaya Sundaram
So many shimmering threads,
So many interwoven lines,
You weave them all together,
And then undo them all,
As you wait for your beloved,
Lost to you for twenty years.
Why undo yourself, when
You’ve spent a whole life
Making up the pattern
Of this, your cloth?
All this hard work, this love,
Your vigilance, your loyalty,
All these for your beloved,
Gone in an instant,
When you pull out those
Shimmering threads of gold
And purple, and blue and green,
Like sunset over the Aegean?
Are you waiting for the one
Who will make you whole again
And who is that?
Is he sailing from the east
Or riding from the west
Or blowing from the north,
Or floating in from the south.
And what if he had not been
Entrapped and turned into
A boar, or not held enraptured
By a seductress on a lonely isle?
And what if he had not fallen asleep
At the sail, and had the wild winds
Loosed by his jealous, drunken men?
Where would you be, or your story?
There is no one, nowhere.
It is you, yourself, alone, undeterred,
Who will stitch up those ends
Tie those knots, weave that scarf,
Arise from this pointless mourning,
This indolence, this matyrdom.
Your making of yourself
Is the unmaking of yourself.
Around you, mirrors abound
And smoke obscures your vision.
Do you care about the ending?
Why undo this scarf you’ve woven,
Why deny yourself your pleasure
In this beautiful work, your art,
When it could be your shroud?
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