![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
duathir.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
greatpoetryCross-post from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
war_poetry:
From The Diary Of A Clinic Nurse, Poland, 1945
"The only safe conclusion to be drawn from the multitude of reports is that life in dark closets, wolves’ dens, forests or sadistic parents’ backyards is not conducive to good health and normal development."
--from 'Wolf Children', in The Genesis of Language, edited by Frank Smith and George A. Miller
Alone with the child, I lay down to bare my neck like a dog surrendering.
The linguists will use her to theorize on the origins of speech—of which she now has none. I’d like to bathe her without being flayed by those six-year-old teeth.
Female child found abandoned in thick woods, healthy, but feral, feet indurated. Hearing intact.
Bays like a wolf.
When I speak, her eyes turn curious. Even dogs grasp simple commands, and she is, a priori, more intelligent than they. Marie, I call her, after Curie, who took two Nobels, chemistry and physics.
The doctors note Semitic traits: deep-hooded eyes, a certain nose, hair dark whorls reduced now to a bramble mat half down her back. To save her from the camps, someone must have led her deep into the woods to wander there like Gretel. Like Snow White.
Doctor Krynski tells his students how Rome’s founders were two brothers suckled by a wolf. But this girl isn’t founding Rome. Red Army men brought her in this week, naked under the sergeant’s coat. At least they hadn’t raped—still, her howls raised the hair on my neck.
Marie, I say, and she looks at me, as if the syllables meant something.
Start with the resonant consonant, M—lips meet, then release. Muh. Marie.
Dirty Jew, the night nurse says, right to her face. The child knows the tone, growls back and bites until they order chloral hydrate. When she wakes up scrubbed and shorn like Sampson, her eyes say, Thou hast betrayed me.
My studies in physics have been blasted of course, and now the doctors snap at me as if I were their serf tending pigs.
But I am not a simple nurse.
Alone with the child, I lay down to bare my neck like a dog surrendering and for the first time she crouched near enough to sniff me. Then the neurologist barged in, and, finding us on the floor like that, had a jealous stint. The grunting little academic—he wants her for research, but first he must examine her—and this she won’t permit. He’d have to drug her—and drugged, she won’t react.
I gave her an orange whirligig, I swear I heard her laugh: a hoarse, exotic yelp.
Muh, I said. Marie.
I lay on the floor like a pup at play. I lay there and begged the Blessed Virgin for Her help and was seized quite suddenly with weeping. The child fixed me with a concentrated stare, then crawled over and sniffed my hand: carbolic soap and tears, if indeed these have a scent.
More doctors came and she fled then to her corner as they shouted at my lack of dignity.
I need the work. I did not shout back.
Marie, you see me, how I’ll soon turn twenty-three and have no sweetheart, family dead, mind matted up and useless and scared for you, Marie of the woods so thick no one heard you shriek. I have not seen your parental wolves but I’ve heard them howling at the lone, callipygous moon, wolves trapped down here in this wrong life. Wrong continent. Wrong earth.
By Belle Waring
war_poetry:From The Diary Of A Clinic Nurse, Poland, 1945
"The only safe conclusion to be drawn from the multitude of reports is that life in dark closets, wolves’ dens, forests or sadistic parents’ backyards is not conducive to good health and normal development."
--from 'Wolf Children', in The Genesis of Language, edited by Frank Smith and George A. Miller
Alone with the child, I lay down to bare my neck like a dog surrendering.
The linguists will use her to theorize on the origins of speech—of which she now has none. I’d like to bathe her without being flayed by those six-year-old teeth.
Female child found abandoned in thick woods, healthy, but feral, feet indurated. Hearing intact.
Bays like a wolf.
When I speak, her eyes turn curious. Even dogs grasp simple commands, and she is, a priori, more intelligent than they. Marie, I call her, after Curie, who took two Nobels, chemistry and physics.
The doctors note Semitic traits: deep-hooded eyes, a certain nose, hair dark whorls reduced now to a bramble mat half down her back. To save her from the camps, someone must have led her deep into the woods to wander there like Gretel. Like Snow White.
Doctor Krynski tells his students how Rome’s founders were two brothers suckled by a wolf. But this girl isn’t founding Rome. Red Army men brought her in this week, naked under the sergeant’s coat. At least they hadn’t raped—still, her howls raised the hair on my neck.
Marie, I say, and she looks at me, as if the syllables meant something.
Start with the resonant consonant, M—lips meet, then release. Muh. Marie.
Dirty Jew, the night nurse says, right to her face. The child knows the tone, growls back and bites until they order chloral hydrate. When she wakes up scrubbed and shorn like Sampson, her eyes say, Thou hast betrayed me.
My studies in physics have been blasted of course, and now the doctors snap at me as if I were their serf tending pigs.
But I am not a simple nurse.
Alone with the child, I lay down to bare my neck like a dog surrendering and for the first time she crouched near enough to sniff me. Then the neurologist barged in, and, finding us on the floor like that, had a jealous stint. The grunting little academic—he wants her for research, but first he must examine her—and this she won’t permit. He’d have to drug her—and drugged, she won’t react.
I gave her an orange whirligig, I swear I heard her laugh: a hoarse, exotic yelp.
Muh, I said. Marie.
I lay on the floor like a pup at play. I lay there and begged the Blessed Virgin for Her help and was seized quite suddenly with weeping. The child fixed me with a concentrated stare, then crawled over and sniffed my hand: carbolic soap and tears, if indeed these have a scent.
More doctors came and she fled then to her corner as they shouted at my lack of dignity.
I need the work. I did not shout back.
Marie, you see me, how I’ll soon turn twenty-three and have no sweetheart, family dead, mind matted up and useless and scared for you, Marie of the woods so thick no one heard you shriek. I have not seen your parental wolves but I’ve heard them howling at the lone, callipygous moon, wolves trapped down here in this wrong life. Wrong continent. Wrong earth.
By Belle Waring
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amazing
Date: 2019-11-06 02:11 pm (UTC)this is brilliant !!
thanks for sharing...
; )
RE: amazing
Date: 2019-11-06 03:15 pm (UTC)RE: amazing
Date: 2019-11-07 01:01 am (UTC)hope you are doing well
; )
no subject
Date: 2019-11-06 04:08 pm (UTC)