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| POETRY |
| MEMORY RAPE |
| She took her pants off, you said, what else was I to do? There, in the middle of a field towards the end of your twenties you rammed the castle gate of once upon. |
| Now almost sixty, you tell me - rejecting friendship and a mouth of mere words, a tongue as guileless as the one I kept curled in my cheek,; the nights we used to kiss, our lips; pressed tight, our covered bodies tighter. |
| Now I remember all at once her looking on with greed at so much happiness. It is her face I study in the yellowing group photo of teenagers on the day we all returned |
| to different lands. She didn't visit ours, or its fields, till some eight years after you and I had split. I' felt no outrage for girls who followed, or, later, for your wife. They'd all come after. But now I lean |
| how one can still rape innocence at almost sixty, tear memories like rent hymens, and blot the past with blood. She was there, a witness to life's one timeless moment when we loved like flaming angels |
| before the fall. Why do you tell me now, far far too late for us to choose a shared damnation, that it was she who had you at the torrid drop from heaven? I, not at all. |
| Maria Grech Ganado |
| BRADAMANT |
| fight after fight |
| all night through the tired visor watching my horse's hoof pawing the ground, as though it were not simply a separate being, as though the pounding of the waves outside grew |
| with its wanting. And here my helmet hangs, heavy, so that I cannot tell what swells the heart I hide, although the sea, at break of day, unfolds before my eyes and my horse rears. |
| How can it be my woman's part should endlessly pursue its purpose through this slant of light, this intercourse which strives but fails to see where I am me? |
| FATHER CHRISTMAS |
| I believed in Father Christmas when I was eight years old; He wasn't scared of winter storms, the darkness or the cold, And if I tried my hardest, the hardest that I could, He was sure to bring me presents whenever I'd been good. |
| I believed in Father Christmas when I had turned sixteen; He'd bounce me fondly on his knee and swear I'd be his queen. I drew a homely picture of joy and mistletoe And dreamed a simple lifetime of warmth and Christmas glow. |
| I believed in Father Christmas when I was twenty nine. I yearned for him to cherish me and longed to make him mine. So when my Father Christmas took me to be his wife, I vowed that I'd believe in him and love him all my life. |
| I believed in Father Christmas till I was thirty four. I scrubbed his floors and cooked his meals and waited by his door. But his demanding work left him no time for lonely women, Though he brought me sacks of babies, petty worries and soiled linen. |
| I believed in Father Christmas till I was quite exhausted, And stopped at last to wonder what it was that could have caused it. And though I keep on trying, now that I'm forty four, I find I can't believe in Father Christmas anymore. |
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