4 Women, Looking Backwards

Yesterday, Friday the 13th, was a day of mixed fortunes. I got a lot done, but my computer has once again started playing up denying me access to some important pieces of work that are needed urgently... But just before that happened, in the afternoon I took a walk after a late lunch when I had been reading Robert Graves' treatment of Orpheus and Eurydice. Then, as I usually do when walking, I was listening to a couple of short podcasts, including one of  Pádraig Ó Tuama's superb "Poetry Unbound" podcasts where he was unpacking Natalie Diaz's poem "Of Course She Looked Back" about Lot's wife. But on "my loop", which took me down by the Lagan, I also caught sight of a woman rowing and had a fleeting encounter with another woman who had just had a prang on the Malone Road. In the hours that followed, as I became hypnotised by the rotating blue circle of doom on my computer, and then this morning, waking early aware of all that I still needed to get done because of the computer glitch, but frustrated by the technological gremlins, these stories got mixed up in my head... and this long rambling piece is the result... It requires a lot more work... but I'll come back to it again...

 An unknown woman on the water, 

Strong long back and legs 

Folding and unfolding 

Like bellows, breathing 

The thick autumn air; 

Facing backwards 

but forging her way forwards 

Against the river’s flow. 

Is she solo because she wants it so 

Or because it is decreed that 

She must be separated 

And so cannot share a boat 

With her sisters; 

Her unseen destination.

In her oar-wielding hands alone?

Lot’s unnamed wife on the road 

Perhaps bearing her belongings 

On her own strong back, 

Nostrils and lungs filled 

With Sodom’s sulphurous smoke. 

It was decreed that the city be destroyed 

And that they should not look back 

But she does look backwards to the dying city 

With the Dead Sea beyond; 

To a place of brutal men, 

A place unwelcoming to strangers, 

Unreceptive to uncomfortable messages, 

And the messengers who bring them,

A place of proverbial evil,

But a place that was her home. 

So was her proverbial petrification 

A punishment from a present tense God 

For dwelling, not in a sinful city 

But in the past, 

Or because of a surfeit of salt tears 

Shed for other unnamed wives 

And daughters and mothers 

Their destinies taken out of their hands.

Eurydice, named wife of Orpheus 

but no longer so well known 

Her name sitting awkwardly 

On modern tongue. 

Another victim of a backward glance 

A double victim of male decisions; 

Of the lust of one 

And the impatience of another. 

Yet much though she may have loved 

The latter and he she, 

Did she really want to leave 

Her place in the shadows? 

Or was she simply subject 

To her husband’s hopes 

And the decrees of Dis? 

Was the singer’s premature peek 

A source of sorrow or relief? 

Yet even after her second demise, 

And descent to the depths,

Like many others in death, 

Her life is not her own 

But sung of by her husband 

And told of by poets and playwrights 

Who never knew her 

Except in their imaginations.

One final, other, unknown woman 

Standing on a street corner, 

Not in any seductive way, 

Because such things do not happen 

In this part of this city, 

But awaiting assistance 

Following an accident. 

If only the other driver 

Had looked backwards, 

Not just in their mirror 

Like the mythic hero slaying

Yet another accursed woman,

But over their shoulder 

They would not have collided 

Before driving on 

Oblivious, or evading responsibility. 

An offer of help is refused, 

With a smile, so perhaps 

It was not because 

I am an unknown man 

In the gathering gloom 

Of an inauspicious afternoon.

One day, four women 

Interwoven in my mind 

Their stories, read, listened to 

Imagined, intersected with 

If only briefly, tangentially 

Their names, save one, unknown 

All, far too quickly, reduced 

To myth, to metaphor. 

Selah