Emblem

photo credit:gizmodo

Beyond the wood

an elderly woman

seems to seek a son

killed in the battles.

Down the street

the men dig,

remove the cloth,

embrace.

Among ordinary things,

she becomes

an emblem, takes

nothing.

***

NaPoWriMo prompt for day 21: Write an erasure poem. I took mine from Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The original text is below. Rather than hold the non-erased words in place, I chose to move them around and re-arrange them a bit:

Such are the visions.  The solitary traveller is soon beyond the wood; and there, coming to the door with shaded eyes, possibly to look for his return, with hands raised, with white apron blowing, is an elderly woman who seems (so powerful is this infirmity) to seek, over a desert, a lost son; to search for a rider destroyed; to be the figure of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world. So, as the solitary traveler advances down the village street where the women stand knitting and the men dig in the garden, the evening seems ominous; the figures still; as if some august fate, known to them, awaited without fear, were about to sweep them into complete annihiliation.

                Indoors among ordinary things, the cupboard, the table, the window-sill with its geraniums, suddenly the outline of the landlady, bending to remove the cloth, becomes soft with light, an adorable emblem which only the recollection of cold human contacts forbids us to embrace. She takes the marmalade; she shuts it in the cupboard.

               

“There is nothing more to-night, sir?”