My first political act? I am seeing
two doors that usually stood open,
leaning together like gossips, making
a closet of their corner.
A mangle stood there, for ironing
what i never thought needed it:
sheets, towels, my father's underwear;
an upright vaccumn with its stuffed
sausage bag thet deflated with a gusty
sigh as if weary of housework as I,
who swore i would never dust or sweep
after i left home, who hated
to see my mother removing daily
the sludge the air lay down like a snail's track
so that when in school i read of Sisyphus
and his rock, it was her I
thought of, housewife scrubbing
on raw knees as the factory rained ash.
Nasty stork of the hobnobbing
doors was a wooden yardstick dusty
with chalk marks from hem's rise and fall.
When I had been judged truly wicked
that stick was the tool of punishment,
I was beaten as I bellowed like a locomotive
as if noise could ward off blows.
My mother wielded it more fiercely
but my father far longer and harder.
I'd twist my head in the mirror to inspect.
I'd study those red and blue mountain
ranges as on a map that offered escape,
the veins and arteries the roads
I could travel to freedom when i grew.
When I was eleven, after a beating
I took the ruler and smashed it to kindling.
Fingering the splinters I could not believe.
How could this rod prove weaker than me?
It was not that i was never again beaten
but in destroying that stick that had measured my pain
the next day i was an adolescent, not a child.
This is not a tale of innocence lost but power
gained : I would not be Sisyphus,
there were things that i should learn to break.
I hte ppl who ryt lky dis. R U mentally impaired? Cn U nt spl? rytng lyk dis robs da wrds of ne senmnts wtsovr.
