Medea, My Inner Poet

My inner poet is a raven-haired Medea,

her smoldering eyes flashing with vengeance and rage;

She is a fury, a Goddess,

a siren whose rousing song seduces men and ships and souls

and renders them speechless, sightless, thought-less,

beckoning them into her arms

only to wrestle them against the sharp edges of the rocks,

her wild laughter echoing in the wind

as they bleed, they weep,

they lose consciousness,

her black eyes swallowing the sight

of their lifeless limbs being tossed irreverently

to and fro by the force of the ocean’s current.

She feels men’s power, licks it off their necks, their thighs,

sipping the sea-salt from their pores, inhaling the scent of their diminished brawn,

the supreme air of condescension

they used to violate her with their gaze, their touch.

Born along the sandy shores of Kalithea,

this Greek-blooded, brooding child

was nurtured by brutal hands and bloody fists,

sex, rapes, and the putrid stench of man’s sweat.

Everything she sees is silhouetted by dark shades of rage, loathing and violence;

and when the gaunt, sullen features of her pallid face are recognized,

the ebony strands of her hair thrashing in the wind,

the white folds of her virginal dress trailing behind her slow, sure-footed strides,

they feel the gloom of her death march.

She knows what men hide in their souls,

what they bury beneath the curves of their smiles,

she knows what their eyes say – she sees the lust, the gore,

the harm they intend, the scorn they conceal,

and she imagines the day when she will only see silence,

the muscles in their faces succumbing to the darkness they had only known in their mother’s womb.

This dark-haired arbiter of vengeance lives inside me,

spitting and hissing like a caged panther,

thrashing and clawing with the want of her freedom.

She grabs hold of my hand and guides my pen,

haunting the pages of my own narrative with

the desperate telling of hers:

an abysmal tale of madness, mothers, and whores –

her story, strangely, has become my own.

She exists through me, because of me;

and I exist in spite of her, searching for the raven-haired child

she used to be – before she gave birth to her own.

Note:This is a poem that I wrote for my writing group in regards to my inner poet.

Copyright© 2010 by Marina DelVecchio. All Rights Reserved.

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