I have contemplated suicide only twice -- or perhaps 3 times. I have resolved not to be a suicide because I love life which I know, better than death, which I don't, and which I suspect to be the ultimate bore.
Musing on the way that anti-abortion arguments turn people into vessels for the production of babies, she asks: "What was the point of making another person, when the woman herself -- a person who already existed -- counts for so little?"
slubber + the British dialectal term gullion (“wretch”).
slubberdegullion (plural slubberdegullions)
from Wiktionary
Someone will need to forgive me for being
who I am, for sneaking back to my blue chair
by the window, where for the last three hundred and seventy days
I have learned that to be alone is what is good for me. I am pretending
as if I really belong with those who want to return to this world
with open arms, even though it has done to us
what it has done. I wish I could love like that,
instead of wanting to turn my back on it all,
as if life in the world were a marriage
assumed too young and necessarily left behind.
Try as I might I will never become
one of the world’s faithful ones.
My naked face and your naked face,
maskless. A cold March dawn,
harsh sunlight, impersonal and honest,
mindless like the light from a surgeon’s lamp
worn on the forehead as you peer down
into the wound. Nothing in this new life
is asked of me except to remember how small I am.
2
Sometimes the world won’t let itself
be sung. Can’t become a poem. Sometimes
we are sane, but sanity alone is not enough.
Warm moonlight and wind. I am sitting here,
simply breathing because there is no other way
to be with those who no longer can.
I don’t know what to say about it all,
but if you do please show me how to be you.
In the last play I saw, fourteen months ago,
before there were no more plays,
they had made a sea of the stage. Songs were chanted
on its shore. Lives lived. People pretended to die
and a ship sailed into the night. A moon. One star.
Afterward, applause. Then began that long silence
which it is now time for me to admit I have loved
beyond any reason or defense. Who among us
has not seen that star to the left
of the lockdown moon, shining
as the ship sets sail?
"Paraphrasing an American saying, she used to argue that patriotism is like a penis: irrespective of its size, it's not a great idea to go waving it around in public"
