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#carol ann duffy
flowerytale · 4 months
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Carol Ann Duffy, from "December"; Rapture
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feral-ballad · 1 year
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Carol Ann Duffy, from The World’s Wife; “Delilah”
[Text ID: “but I cannot be gentle, or loving, or tender. / I have to be strong. / What is the cure?”]
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apoemaday · 22 days
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Eurydice
by Carol Ann Duffy
Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground.
So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard -- Ye Gods -- a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door.
Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize.
Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears.
Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc.
In fact girls, I’d rather be dead.
But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal.
Orpheus strutted his stuff.
The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears.
Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life -- Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife -- to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths…
He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever.
So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked.
Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this -- I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey.
It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke -- Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again…
He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me.
What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone.
The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.
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derangedrhythms · 1 year
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I have called your name over and over in my head 
Carol Ann Duffy, Selling Manhattan; from ‘Correspondents’
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solar-settings · 7 months
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from physics, by carol ann duffy // jackie and shauna, yellowjackets
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metamorphesque · 9 months
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Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head, so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name, like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables like a charm, like a spell.
You, Carol Ann Duffy
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my4ththerapist · 24 days
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nothing, and I mean absolutely NOTHING will get me as riled up as religious symbolism
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hangsawoman · 10 months
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girlfriends by carol ann duffy
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petaltexturedskies · 14 days
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Spring's pardon comes, a sweetening of the air, the light made fairer by an hour, time as forgiveness, granted in the murmured colouring of flowers, rain's mantra of reprieve, reprieve, reprieve.
Carol Ann Duffy, from “Spring” in Collected Poems
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eqqautor · 4 months
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thinking thoughts.... anthy rgu x thetis by carol ann duffy (both women are trapped in the narrative and trapped by the powerful men around them who shape their life.....
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bichefanee · 9 months
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carol ann duffy, medusa // eiichi yamamoto, belladonna of sadness // frederick sandys, love's shadow // sylvia plath, lady lazarus // tinto brass, the howl // ethel cain, ptolomea
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flowerytale · 2 years
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Carol Ann Duffy, from "Girl Talking", Collected Poems
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feral-ballad · 1 year
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Carol Ann Duffy, from The World’s Wife; “Thetis”
[Text ID: “I shrank myself / to the size of a bird in the hand / of a man. / Sweet, sweet, was the small song / that I sang, / till I felt the squeeze of his fist.”]
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apoemaday · 11 months
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Forest
by Carol Ann Duffy
In fact, the trees are murmuring under your feet, a buried empathy; you tread it.                                                  High over your head, the canopy sieves light; a conversation you lip-read. The forest                                       keeps different time; slow hours as long as your life, so you feel human. So you feel more human; persuaded what you are by wordless breath of wood, reason in resin. You might name them--                                     oak, ash, holly, beech, elm-- but the giants are silence alive, superior, and now you are all instinct; swinging the small lamp of your heart as you venture their world: the green, shadowy, garlic air                                                 your ancestors breathed. Ah, you thought love human till you lost yourself in the forest, but it is more strange.                                    These grave and patient saints who pray and pray and suffer your little embrace.
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derangedrhythms · 1 year
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Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture; from ‘You’ 
TEXT ID: Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head, so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name, like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables like a charm, like a spell.
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glimmeringdreams · 7 months
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Then a butterfly paused on a trembling leaf is your breath.
Then the sun's soft bite on my face is your mouth.
Then the fruit from the cherry tree falling on grass is your kiss, your kiss.
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Then a bee in a rose is your fingertip touching me here.
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Then the river staring up, lovesick for the moon, is my long night.
Then the day's hours are theatres of air where I watched you entranced.
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Then a shawl of sunlight dropped in the grass is a garment discarded.
Absence
by Carol Ann Duffy
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