The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poem Thread, 9/28/07

[BlueIris]

In the 1994 book, A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form By Contemporary Women, the author had this to say about the series of sonnets from which the following is taken: "The poe(m)...(is) part of a sonnet sequence tracing the rise and fall of the last Empress of China. Tz'u-Hsi entered the Imperial Palance as a fifth-place concubine. When she birthed a son, she rose quickly through the ranks to become Empress at the age of twenty-six. Her last act was to appoint a two-year-old to her throne, and the imperial system collapsed shortly after in 1912...But why sonnets?...Because one theme of the series is duality: heart and mind, ambition and passivity, nurture and destruction. I imagined a woman forced to balance in herself many opposing forces."

"Princess Parade"

Tea for the emporer arrives on a tray,
barely tasted, unspoiled.
So do the ladies
who ride high above the soil
through the Gate of Humble Birth
to the Hall of Purity. A wing,
the poet said, is neither heaven nor earth
and the ladies comb their hair like wings
or cresting waves, eager to set down
in one place or another. They clutch
good-luck boxes of babies shoes, brown
butterflies. The Emporer says this much:
I like the one with Sorrow Brows,
her face a frieze of falling snow.

—Sarah Gorham

[BlueIris]

1. Kick.

[BlueIris]

2. Kick.

[BlueIris]

3. Kick.