Tag: Feminist Poetry

Sylvia,

I needed you older.

Not thirty.

Older.

I needed more pages.

Not because Ariel
was not enough.

Because I got older

and your pages
did not.

At some point
I crossed into years
you never wrote from.

That is where
I started missing you differently.

There was a time
I could find myself
inside what you had made.

Not perfectly.

But enough.

I was phrased by her.

I could still find
the girl.

The rage.

The body
too close to the mind.

The mind
that would not leave
the body alone.

But I needed you later.

I needed Mirror
after the face changed.

I wanted to know
what happened
when the face looking back
had lived long enough
to become unfamiliar.

I needed Tulips
after all that red
was no longer
an emergency.

What happens
when being alive
is simply something
you keep doing.

I needed Lady Lazarus
after resurrection
lost its spectacle.

After getting up again
was no longer
a return from anything.

Just morning.

Another body
to inhabit.

Another day
to move through.

I needed the bees later.

I wanted to know
what fear became
after you had lived
with it long enough.

If you still asked it
to leave.

If you learned
where it lived.

Maybe your language
would have changed
with you.

Maybe Mirror
would not have been
the same mirror.

Maybe Tulips
would not have carried
the same red.

Maybe Lady Lazarus
would have meant
something quieter.

Maybe love
would have become
less about beginning

and more about
what a woman does
after she has already
been disappointed by it

and still cannot
give it up.

After she has seen
what it can fail to be.

After she has mistaken
attention for tenderness
silence for depth
waiting for devotion.

After she has promised herself
she will know better
next time.

And then she does.

And it changes nothing.

She still believes
there is something
worth staying open for.

That is the part
I needed you to write.

Love
after you have survived
enough of it
to know better

and still cannot
bring yourself
to become someone
who no longer believes in it.

I needed your language
after youth.

After certainty.

After the first grief.

The body
after the body changed.

Desire
after knowing better.

Grief
after everyone else
thought it should be over.

The years
when time
does not answer
what you thought
it would.

Sometimes
you survive something

and that is all.

No lesson.

No beautiful transformation.

You are simply
still here.

And then
there is tomorrow.

I am in those years now.

I wanted the books
you never got to write.

The later ones.

The ones where grief
had been around
long enough
to stop feeling new.

Where desire
had already disappointed you
and still returned.

Where the woman
on the page
had lived long enough
to contradict
the woman she had been.

I wanted to open
one of those books

and find
this version of me
already there.

Not the girl.

I know where
to find her.

I was phrased by her.

I mean
the woman after.

The one
who knows better
and still wants.

The one
who has become older
than some of her grief

but not free of it.

The one
who thought
she would understand
more by now.

I needed one page
from that woman.

One sentence
that did not resolve.

One line
written from an age
you never reached

that I could put
my hand on
and think—

there.

That is me.

Not healed.

Not wiser.

Not finished.

Just there.

You gave me language once.

I wanted to know
what your language
would have become

if you had lived
long enough
to need new words too.

Somewhere
in the pages
you never got to write

I still believe
there might have been
a sentence

waiting
for the woman
I became.