The Awakening

For the Midweek Motif at Poets United:  Awakening

The Awakening

*”S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.  Ma penciocche gammai di questo fondo Non torno viva alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo”   “If I thought that my reply were given to anyone who might return to the world, this flame would stand forever still; but since never from this deep place has anyone returned alive, if what I hear is true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.”  Translation from the Italian in Dante’s Inferno

**Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table….” Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S.Eliot

I was eleven. I was bored.
I wandered into the kitchen and whined.
My grandmother was busy making strawberry jam.
I whined until she said,
take this spoon and keep stirring.
She left and went to our library and returned
10 minutes later.
Here. Read this. This will keep you amused for a few days.
She handed me a battered book.
I took the book and went up on the sleeping porch
and to the wuftwuftwuft of the overhead fans,
I began to read.
I read the whole collection of poems
over the next couple of days.
My mind was blown.
“Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
I was awakened.

*Epigraph to Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
**Beginning of Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock