In her cape lined with bear fur
the Volva Vigga wandered aimlesely
in the woodsland she used to feel
safe and secure and stable in.
This had been six weeks since
her vicious vitriolic violation.
The healer she had sought healed
her beaten, bombarded body so-so.
Her sister Sophia who had come
soon after sat with her for seven
despairing days and seven sad nights
talking and reading to her from
their grandmother's old diaries.
These leatherbound parchments
bore witness. A child's rape.
Gruesome reading it was
and somehow their granny got through -
but only when Grosswolf was knifed.
The steel from Toledo well sharpened
had sheared the perpetrator's neck.
The woodsland fey had made sure
that the hushed hut was enchanted,
so Vigga the Volva could rest
and get her bearings, alas not brought.
She would remember till her dying day
the victimization of her true self
and the total helplessness towards
the power of the cruelest brutality.
Vividly she replayed the rape in raw visuals.
Not being able to stop the pounding
hit her womanhood with such frustration.
She was perfectly and purely powerless.
How could she live on? Facing real reality
she wringed her slender white hands.
Her bosom had started to swell
Her nausea nipped her in the early dawn
Her missing monthly female flux -
Vigga the Volva wanted to weigh
the various ways of her crucial choices
something that any woman would do
in her strenuous and sticky situation.
She was not as young as she pretended.
In her womanly prime she would weigh
the prime possibility of ever carrry a child
or elect to bear the vicious rapist's copy.
Her delicate dilemma was not easy.
She came to the little brook she so
often had gathered healing herbs for fey.
Staring at her self - an image of healthy woman
in the water she was asking herself,
could she truly come to love the child?
In truth - she sighed - she could not.
She would always both see her perpetrator
that face was engraved with a rage so bound
in hatred and think of her own helplessness.
One thing she wanted for a child of the earth
was happiness from within, and she could not....
Having mulled over the rippling waters
she sighed and started to warily walk
towards the healing woman's hut.
Vigga the Volva had made her choice.
4 comments:
The children are always the victims.
One way or another, they pay.
The "sins of the fathers" afflict
them;
Unfair though it is, that's the way.
Some killed in the wombs of their mothers,
Some put out for strangers to raise,
Some pointed at by all the others,
Called "bastard" for all of their days.
We read Undset's book "Gunnar's Daughter,"
And shudder to think of the hate
That brought up her baby to slaughter
The father who loved him too late.
And then, Leonardo's young mother--
How much would this sad world have lost,
Had she simply decided to smother
Her infant, not face the harsh cost!
Alas there is no tidy answer,
So let this reflection suffice,
Though rape is a true social cancer,
It's the baby who still pays the price.
Maybe Leonardo's mother
was faced with this dilemma,
however nobody should judge
a woman's choice - an anathema.
If you sit in your high seat
with your own holy beliefs
and claim that you are right,
please do not me begrudge
that I take you up and fight
for my credence and other.
Not a word of judgement said--
If it's there, it's in your head.
Truth was all I stated there--
Children pay, and that's unfair,
Whether they are never born,
Or they live while others mourn
And reproach with bastardy,
Since they never asked to be!
Still, the guilt the man should bear,
Strewing seed without a care
If it sprouts or if it dies.
Either way, the woman cries.
The woman cries -
yes and no!
Sometimes it is
a touch-and-go!
End of discussion
now heave-ho!
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