the ripening
by Annalisa Chen, Methodist Ladies’ College (MLC)
Years 11 – 12 Written Poetry Finalist
‘Alvida’ by John Bauer (1912)
look at you, all golden ringlets and milk-white skin
leaning out the window – a vision in cream;
cream like your wedding dress, perpetual weddings
and bouquets and puffed sleeves and all the lacy trappings
of a girlhood fragile as the thin skin strained around
an overripe pear: splitting at the seams to hold back
the grainy sweetness inside, cloying enough to remind me
of rot. you’re beautiful like daisy chains, like spun sugar,
like the angels nigh. they told me that too –
that I was more of a nymph than a girl, some wild and lovely naiad
left here to wander among mortal men like them.
don’t you see? that’s why they wanted me; that’s why
they want you. and you must forgive me for sounding bitter
I am only a little jealous of the smooth roses in your cheeks.
my skin is sun-browned and creased with age, my hair iron-grey,
my eyes gone rheumy and spotted with petechiae
from hours plying my needle with ever-waning dexterity.
so I confess that I still envy you the softness of your face
and the way the world in turn softens when it looks at you…
But you must listen, you must! a girl may be forgiven almost anything
while she is young and lovely, but you are not a girl anymore.
you have been condemned already to womanhood – you have flowered,
and now you are swollen to bursting, sweet on the skin,
bruised beneath the fingers, mawkish with ripeness,
engorged with all they will ask of you:
your unspoiled beauty, your forgiving heart, your soft hands, your brightest years
and they’ll take and they’ll take and they’ll take and they’ll take
until your mealy insides are cleaved open from giving,
and then when you are no longer sweet, they will leave you to the flies and the bruised earth.
I can see it in your eyes and hear it in the bell of your laugh, you won’t listen – but that’s okay, I never listened either. still for some impossible reason I hope that you’ll be cleverer than I was;
less in love, perhaps.
look around you. see how your house bears fruit: pears swelling from every branch, grapes hanging in fat purple fists, leaves reaching for ever more until there is hardly room
for light to slip through. is it not almost insulting, how plain it is? fruit by the window, fruit heavy on every bough, and I suppose that when you look outside all you can see are also fruit trees.
you, too, were made to bear fruit.
you can love him. kneel for him. roll over and show him the soft flesh of your belly,
give him children until your gums grow soft, until your teeth loosen and fall,
until your body has nothing left to give.
it will not save you from my fate.
Go, I beg you. Not all is lost: take this from me, and run.