Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Ralph Monday- A Poem


Through this Lens

Men never get it, through the beer, football
games, late night TV, the long ago lost
high school sweetheart—too late—the image of
women forever photoshopped as a caricature
imprinted on a bad piece of film.

What is it, this Big Bang origin of the male
perceived feminine?

fig-leaved Eve
damsel in distress
the knight with the pedestaled dame
Pre-Raphaelite romanticism
whore of Babylon
Victoria's angels

All overlays like the crusted, built up
surface of a Renaissance painting,
chiaroscuros so deeply shadowed
that the core of her is lost in the
testosteroned pigments

where only a woman can scrape away
the ragged surface and say

See
See

These are my colors
This my rose hips
There my raw sienna bones
Here my thoughts deep ultramarine 

I would share my secrets with you
my sisters too
if only you could truly know.


Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 50 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book Empty Houses and American Renditions was published May 2015 by Aldrich Press. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer was published June 2015 by Odin Hill Press.

 

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