Showing posts with label Willis Barnstone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Willis Barnstone. Show all posts

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Does it have to be this way?

black and white picture of tree over headstones
Poem Untitled
- Sumangala's mother
(trans. from Pali by Willis Barnstone)

A free woman. At last free!
Free from slavery in the kitchen
where I walked back and forth stained
and squalid among cooking pots.
My brutal husband ranked me lower
than the shade he sat in.
Purged of anger and the body's hunger,
I live in meditation
in my own shade from a broad tree.
I am at ease.

Aint' I A Woman! A Book of Woman's poetry From Around the World, Edited by Illona Linthwaite.