Shura

My flesh, my blood and your stem ill and bitter
Sink deep into your grave my little bold skinned flower
So small with your weak limbs heiress in your mother’s arms
You killed an angel you filthy exotic paranoid foreigner
With your orange silks, bangles at your wrists.
Known beloved, known neurotic will you ever be forgiven?
In death both of you will thrive at Ted Hughes’s bone-clinic
And you will whisper that war, your majesty, is a crime.
My dreamer, love poem, sonnet and my shell, my hell.
Death is a monster, a shell, while the sea is a ghost.
The air is beautiful, isn’t it like a Paris soul, after a killing.

The combinations of water in a glass, the clarity of words,
A white meringue of a beautiful dress, is it mine, is it mine?
My stories are fragmentary, my poetry is terrible because
I say it is so it is so. My love for you is a blank thrill.
It is dying. Shame. But I have brought it upon myself you see.
I dislike my conversation. I’ve drilled it into myself. Gas.
This emptiness. Talent is my enemy. I wish to cry. You have left.
Regard me no more as a lover. I will take the promises you made
To the grave. You will stand at the mouth of it, its purse.
Together Shura and I will rest in eternity. I will cling to her.
I do not need your soul. Our spirits are clouds, numb, celestial.

Everything, the earth is diminishing in front of my eyes.
People have become puppets. Winter has power over my mood.
There is no man on the moon. He has disappeared for good.
The angels have seen to that. Only a feminist remains. She is fair.
She is my gift to you, to Shura. No more harm will come to us now.
My mouth is frozen. My lips are blue with cold. My limbs, my limbs.
I cannot feel them. You chiselled them out of the thin air of ghosts.
I am distancing myself more and more away from you. Evaporate.
Your father is responsible for this. I am off the edge. Leaning
Towards bleeding intelligently, rain is a feast and so is morals.
But you knew nothing of the latter brute, beast, traitor, and coward.

It hurts that you hurt me and that you hurt Shura too.
But what is the pain of my lotus flower? But sacrifices have to be made.
Why always the vulnerable, the wounded, the sick and troubled?
My beauty was accidental until glaciers came between us.
I wish I had destroyed you now, not romanced, and not seduced you.
Now I only have the capacity within me for spring, to swim.
Tel Aviv and Canada are both distant memories. I trained myself to grow wise.
The night is different now. I feel it all the time. Shura in my arms.
We are both prisoners. I can never make plans. She will never grow old.
Ted Hughes’s ugly duckling will never grow into a swan.
She, my Shura will never fall in love and whose fault is that.

———–

Assia Wevill, the greatest rival of Sylvia Plath

Love me I said
But in the end you hated me
And bitterly so.
Green was not our landscape.
It was much more as if
My childhood had begun to bloom again.
Nazi Germany, the train, that awful train journey, growing up
In Tel Aviv, the needles, flying into tantrums.
Was my English not articulate enough for you?
I would have peeled all the potatoes in the world for you
Given the chance but I was nothing like her was I?

Why didn’t you just say so?
That I wasn’t good enough.
Three marriages, three marriages.
I knew what they were all thinking.
Why weren’t you the one that came out with it, that said it out loud?
Let us put an end to this but it was much more than an affair.
You had said so yourself on numerous occasions.
Copycat. Copycat. They all said afterwards.
When I held Shura in my arms the one thing
That meant the most in the world to me all I could think of
Please forgive me.

Your gestures are in my blood you know.
Flowers in my brain while I fidget in my grave.
Gone too soon. Gone too soon from my beautiful Ted’s world
Of words, your seasons, your earth and your paragraphs
That I have envied for all of our life together
With our children. All I ever wanted is a glimpse of us as perfect people.
It is not working. This is not working so I will put on a disguise.
You abandoned me. You abandoned our blossoms.
Our kingdom, your throne for my empire of the sun.
Health is past. I am no longer part of the living my darling.
You have damaged my imagination forever and I cannot even

Dream of living uprooted
And forever being infiltrated by a madman.
Did you remember her at all when you were with us?
When you were up close and personal with shades
Of your dirty-exotic Assia and little pampered Shura?
And now that you will never see us ever again.
The taste of a double life was wonderful wasn’t it?
At the cost of others what do you feel inside your heart now?
Is it waves of decay inside the pool of your great mind?
I was your greatest admirer. Shura was Frieda’s greatest admirer.
Will you ever write a great poem again?

———–

Poetry: Abigail George

Image Pixabay remixed