"Walk Duchess, Walk" by Debra Reilly
(This poem is based off the image to the right.) Oh, Duchess, look not at your surroundings: at the guards suppressing the unruly tide of plebs in gritty oranges and greens, at the judges trailing behind your Duchess derriere in sickly sanguine and pompous reds, as both bands are as disagreeable as the stones beneath the soft step of your bare feet. Look at you, standing like a Lady Liberty, bearing the sea of sickening masses in a sheet as spiritually pure as those virgin Puritan sails that waved towards America’s shores. Stand no more. Walk, Duchess, so these people may not taint you. Look not at your husband, whose head appears as blanched as a skull: from such a connection did arise their condemnation. Look at yourself: you, vulnerable-- you, trying to cover your body, yet baring your feet, baring your neck— bearing his treatment: look not at your husband: he, as useful as he is tan, motions not to help, but to hear, merely clearing his hound dog hood from his cadmium ears. Look not but walk, Duchess: walk off this unwarranted punishment and this ambivalent, dead Duke. Walk, Duchess, walk, all the way if you must, to new life and new land. |