Come, behold the Elephant Woman
Who hatched from a mother dove’s egg.
She is loud and tall and
See how she tramples the world underfoot
Great are the feet and wide
Of she, the Elephant Woman
Wanderer long-minded, she remembers
What you have forgotten
The ancient waterholes,
The graveyards luminous in the desert’s night
She has tales to tell,
She the Elephant Woman.
Gentle, sometimes, the Elephant Woman –
She lowers her trunk to tickle children,
Holds them in her arms.
But should someone raise a hand against them,
She would rise, Goddess of Destruction,
Grow new arms, a second head,
Dance drunken on their burning cities,
Rend bridges with her tusks.
She, the Elephant Woman,
Who came from a mother dove’s egg.
“…hatched from mother dove’s egg …long-minded, she remembers
What you have forgotten …to tickle children, but…” Sometimes in reading your poetry, I seem to gasp at the core strength you reveal – yours AND mine. (Apparently I haven’t finished creating my own effective mythology and metaphors, so I snitch — I mean: share yours.)
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“The Elephant Woman “is sweet, poignant, and pure in language and approach. It projects the interlacing of love and loyalty. It reads like a Yeats, yet dangles the imagination and brings to mind words of an anonymous millennial poet: “think only how time changes everything and yet how nothing changes overall.” It is not often now a days that I read a poem wishing there was more, hoping it was longer.
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