Breaking Out by Marge Piercy

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.