poems by
barbara a. thomas
Joy and Sylvia in Nazareth
For my mother Joy, born October 1955, died June 2003
and her muse Sylvia, born October 1932, died February 1963
1.
You sleep with the Germans every night
and in the morning they wrap you up tightly in their regiments –
remind you that you are alone, you are alone. There is a war somewhere.
Mostly in your backyard between the apple trees where you and your sister
and brother are tied up praying hands up into sap that you will be transferred
to another camp with some other wrinkled old Nazis on watch.
You want to play with the sweet black boy down the street – but
are reminded who your mother really is
jezebel
jew
gypsy
whore
I know it isn’t true, I know it isn’t true
Love is just a lie, made to make you blue
love hurts, ooh ooh love hurts
ooh ooh love hurts
2.
Your own children come twenty years later
Run laughing through the rose gardens at your grandmother’s house
in Seattle. They sit cross-legged under the massive apple tree making
circles around it with their thin skinned little arms,
fingers,
ears to sap
and stare some sad blue-eyed confusion toward you as you weep.
love is like a flame
it burns you when it’s hot
love hurts, ooh ooh love hurts
ooh ooh love hurts
3.
Before you join Sylvia – you write a poem called Excavation
with incredibly inebriated compassion
“Don’t bulldoze my grandpa’s house,
don’t remove the roses,
or the shed, or picket fence–
it’s more than meets the eye
To me. I grew up underneath
the apple tree you raze.
I weaned myself upon the fruit;
You can’t take that away.”
The roses die every year. Every year they die with dignity.
Roses cultivated by the Nazis die with more dignity than you – Joy
– will ever know. You blame the Germans before you die. Sylvia Plath
was a goddamn German too and you have no problem loving her. You also
fuck a black man. Or two. Or you were raped.
The truth is a parable in your death poems and open to interpretation.
I’m young, I know, but even so
I know a thing or two
I learned from you
I really learned a lot, really learned a lot
love is like a flame
it burns you when it’s hot
4.
Every book I have of yours which is all you had of any value
when you died, has passages of Sylvia’s underlined: words,
stanza’s, life, metaphors, conclusions
In the german tongue, in the polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars
or research written into the margins:
Lady Lazarus:
resurrection/the one god has helped
or scratched out:
suicidal, at one with the drive
I still find scraps of Sylvia's poems folded in with pansies, lilacs,
marigolds,
and roses, roses, roses not Gertrude steins roses. No, yours had MUCH
more meaning. Flowers among random anthologies as if you were trying to
keep her alive. keep yourself alive. I hated her until I found her like
this.
Found you like this realized that I might be the same Auschwitz
sometimes I find motherhood comparably wretched
– just not quit as suicidal or mortal
I never told you that I lost my virginity to a black man and I loved him
and I fucked him
- and women now
jezebel
jew
gypsy
whore
I know it isn’t true, I know it isn’t
true
Love is just a lie, made to make you blue
Love hurts, ooh ooh love hurts
ooh ooh love hurts
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