“Girl Singing: I carry Gilgamesh in my belly,”

Girl Singing: I carry Gilgamesh in my belly,

oxen herding my song
without a hen, the chicks run
distracted through the grass

go about the house pecking at planks.
I heavy as a hog sit at last in the
boat of the west

forever. We
must treasure the dream whatever the terror
go to the barn with or without fear where

despair waits: your ewes shall drop
twins and your goats triplets
all newly cleaned and neatly arranged for the flood.

He who engraved on a stone the whole story
sank it in the sluices while
I simply moaned:

tear down your house and build a boat
drones at the hive
your stormy heart beating twice for mine

dark and darker before a mist of
sleep like soft wool teased from a sheep
gets stuck in my throat.

Elision,    the
smallest of swamp flies,
opens its eyes

opens its thighs
I
only say, there is no permanence

to make me rise. Let me live to be the
wonder of my mother. I sing like ten curs
under a ring of cedars pining

for the Faraway nearer than a breath.

      (By and © Sasha Steensen)

[Note: Sasha writes: “The Secret Life of an Angel” reminds me of Gilgamesh, perhaps because of “Babaylan. ” “Babaylan” reminds me of the “baby” I currently carry. She pokes       & insists on herself, which reminds me of Gilgamesh. They both want to live forever.

The procedure:
1.Start with the same number of stanzas and lines as “The Secret Life of an Angel.”
2.Retain the first letter of each line from “The Secret Life of an Angel.”
3.For each stanza, borrow one line from The Epic of Gilgamesh (Trans. N.K. Sandars).
4.Borrowed lines can begin a line, start in the middle of a line, be contained within one line and/or be enjambed.
5.First and last lines of the poem retain words or phrases from both The Epic of Gilgamesh and “The Secret Life of an Angel.”

List of borrowed lines:
Stanza 1 (first line): “Girl Singing” from “The Secret Life of an Angel” and “Gilgamesh” from The Epic of Gilgamesh
Stanza 2: “the chicks.../…grass”
Stanza 3: “sit…/…west”
Stanza 4: “we/…terror”
Stanza 5: “your…/…triplets”
Stanza 6: “he…story”
Stanza 7: “tear…boat”
Stanza 8: “a mist…/…sheep”
Stanza 9: “smallest…flies”
Stanza 10: “there…permanence”
Stanza 11: “Let…/…mother.”
Stanza 12 (last line): “the Faraway” from The Epic of Gilgamesh and “nearer than a breath” from “The Secret Life of an Angel”]

Comments

[Eileen]

"eyes" to "ewes" is one of many brilliant gems here. Love it!
eileen

[mietwagen]

Sehr gute Seite. Ich habe es zu den Favoriten.

[ipad 3 sleeve]

Really a good and nice work. I will talk about it with my friends. Thanks for such a wonderful share!

[ipad 3 sleeve]

Really a good and nice work. I will talk about it with my friends. Thanks for such a wonderful share!

[Micah]

Like the idea. Laptops + eTexts + wiki or EtherPad + wordle = done?Scanning tuoghrh a text on a smart phone doesn't sound like a whole lotta fun I know part of the point is in class but this seems like one where you might get higher quality input by assigning the quote-finding activity outside of class and spend more in-class time analyzing the results (with a bit more front-end analysis possible for the instructor before class, too).A variant: using something like Classroom Presenter to facilitate close reading of one or two paragraphs. If you could send out those paragraphs to students for annotation/questioning/commenting, receive that back, and have some engine digest the student input into a form for further discussion that would be cool, too.Concept mapping is another potential real-time textual analysis tool if small groups developed concept maps on chunks of text, then shared those, and again some sort of magic happened to highlight commonalities and differences between the mappings for whole-group thinking neato. I did something like this in a small undergraduate course I taught on the first day of class as a quick way to preview the several trade book texts we were using for the semester. Different groups took on different texts and did high-level concept maps on the structure/content of the books, then shared out to the rest of the class, helping everyone to develop a sense of the utility, intersection, and distinctions of the texts.

[NoviEetacyangkkmanyokap]

I'll be back. Writing and reading dtefnieily create a dialog between now and yesterday, today and tomorrow. reaching out to those who I am never to meet in inspiring indeed. Keep on writing!

[Victoria]

Holly I've often thought that it is those who have been wiknalg with the Lord for a good long while that makes His best servants. I really believe that. God's been giving you stuff for the last several decades for a time such as this. To give to other people. Now that's what I call opportunity!