snacking on poetry

i go thru fits. reading fits that is. other fits too, but i won't discuss those today. sometimes it's all about autobiographies - colin powell, lillian hellman, hildegarde. one summer, it was all of alice hoffman's mystical novels. one spring it was jane austen's lovelies. one autumn in college was spent nose buried in daphne du maurier's glamorous British manor mysteries. one winter...into spring...into summer, it was tolstoy's anna karenina. (by the time i got to the end of that tome, i found myself waiting, hoping, begging for that whiny wench to just end it already. sheesh. co-dependency is such a bore.)

lately, it's been all about poetry. i guess it's because i am so busy as of late, i can't sit down and dedicate any length of time to actually finishing the two books i started quite a while ago - George Eliot's Middlemarch or Lyndall Gordon's Vindication, a biography of the 18th century revolutionary feminist and author, Mary Wollstonecraft. (goodness, i sound like a smarty-bobolardey. i am not. i read way too many teeny-bopper magazines and self-help books on the sly to be a true intellectual. i also do not drink my coffee black or smoke cigarettes. 2 more strikes against me.)

anyway...lately...all about poetry. just a few read on the subway platform, between toner-changes at work, just before i slip away into a vodka-induced slumber, while sipping my morning coffee. oh, i love 'em. it's like the brilliance and profundity of great tomes of literature condensed into a discriminate offering of words. love it.

so. here's my fave from today's readings...blog-appropriate, of course.

fat is not a fairy tale by jane yolen

I am thinking of a fairy tale
Cinder Elephant
Sleeping Tubby,
Snow Weight,
where the princess is not
anorexic, wasp-waisted;
flinging herself down the stairs.

I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Hansel and Great,
Repoundsel,
Bounty and the Beast,
where the beauty
has a pillowed breast,
and fingers plump as sausage.

I am thinking of a fairy tale
that is not yet written,
for a teller not yet born,
for a listener not yet conceived,
for a world not yet won,
where everything round is good:
the sun, wheels, cookies, and the princess.