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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
POLYGAMY, by KAREN SWENSON Poet's Biography First Line: When an official goes upcountry Last Line: His name green as unreaped fantasy. Subject(s): Children - Illegitimate; Polygamy; Thailand; Birth - Out Of Wedlock; Bastards | |||
"When an official goes up-country they'll give him anything," she says, this woman boned like a lark's wing whose feet barely reach the pedals of the car she's weaving through the fabric of Bangkok, "their house, their daughter." She shifts with emphasis. "Particularly their daughter. It," she pauses on the abstract pronoun, "breeds a debt the family can collect. She sang at the hotel in town." At a light our flanks shudder among the traffic herd. I see that youthful mistress smoke-wreathed in rooms of men, sheath her in stoplight red which cornering like a Ferrari blinks GO as her soprano flutters mawkish Thai-pop and rote-learned Beatles vowels. "My husband, six years later, gave a party for old employees. He said one would bring a child. The guests left. The boy stayed." We edge a gray matron Volvo through the poppy-and-apricot soiree of three-wheeled tuk-tuks. "I knew. He didn't have to tell." I ask, "What did you say?" "I said to him, 'I thought you were different.' But she was young, poor, had to earn her living, while we'd plenty." A bus bears down. She turns beneath its chromium grimace into a first wife directing murmurations of concubine children, cross-legged obedience at lessons. "Still I can't forgive. Our daughters are ashamed and the boy, sixteen now, fails school." I consider, in Bangkok's weave, what landowner, fields redistributed by revolution, does not, passing forfeit hectares in the moonlight, hear the siren rice call his name green as unreaped fantasy. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE: 11. IN THE RESTAURANT by THOMAS HARDY THE BALLAD OF A DAFT GIRL by DOROTHY ALDIS THE WEDDING MORNING by THOMAS HARDY THE NATURAL CHILD by HELEN LEIGH |
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