P.S. Cottier #24 (Tight blonde curls)

Tight blonde curls
each a spiral staircase
twisting perfection

P.S. Cottier

Here's my tiny contribution to the Rapunzel fest, although I was thinking more of Shirley Temple curls when I wrote it just now.

Rosemary Nissen-Wade #24: Rapunzel Retold

Rapunzel Retold

Walled in

inside the high tower

I find the young woman

('Just a girl, really,' 

she was sometimes told)

who dangled her long golden hair

softly over the faces of her babies,

her babies who

with smiles and tiny grabbing fingers

travelled up those strands to gaze in her eyes,

hoisting their brand-new awareness

in through the open window

of mother love.

When then was now, 

she sat in a house on the ground

with not only windows but doors that opened.

And that was fine for many years

while the babies thrived and grew.

How could she know

one was growing wrong?

To her eyes, the traces were faint

mostly invisible.

The thing became apparent

gradually. Even in his youth

and early manhood

she didn't see.

An infection, of sorts, in the brain –

or a chunk of it missing?

She has her ideas by now,

but even now can only guess.

The youngest son in the tales

meets many challenges, no?

Makes amazing journeys.

His were into delusion,

His were into hatred.

Finally, after years of tears,

she performed a ritual of distant healing

for the troubled man who had become

fearful to her, and unknown.

Then she expunged him from her life,

as had many others.

It was not for cruelty that her Sorceress

blocked behind high walls of stone

a long-ago mother playing with her babies,

and that youngest, enchanting child

with his early gifts for drawing and poetry,

his precocious insights, and the smile 

that still, in memory, makes her heart turn over.

I felt there was more for me to explore in the Rapunzel archetype, and sure enough....

Rosemary Nissen-Wade #19: Rapunzel Revisited

Rapunzel Revisited

Part I

Night's my time; it's always been.

In that stillness, all alone,

I find the thoughts that are my own –

not those another mind has given.

Mine is the deep and silent hour.

My parents gave me into care

of another, cruel 'mother'.

We have no blood nor love to share.

She closed me in this Tower.

In the daylight I can see

from my window every tree,

the orchards fruiting merrily

but never to be plucked by me,

the lonely girl with the long gold hair.

I know she does not value me

except as trophy. I can be

her proof of power. And I see

she likes my long gold hair.

She uses them, these long gold locks –

like steps of a ladder, or piled rocks

to climb to my heights. For what she lacks

is her own way to scale the peaks

of thought I reach within this Tower.

She tells me beauty matters, but

my hair's the only claim I've got

to loveliness. 'It won't be cut!'

– my useful, long gold hair.

Part II

As I watched the landscape darken

underneath the moody moon,

I wove from my imagination

ways to travel out, be gone
from the lonely, stoney Tower.

And did I let my hair down

for a prince who ventured from the town

and wound my silly heart around

his finger, like my hair?

It's true that I began to long

to join the playful dance and song

I heard so distantly; to throng

with other girls and boys, along

the paths beyond my stone-walled bower.

But it was I who rescued me.

I cut my own locks, breaking free

of her ideas and tyranny.

I left the blighted Tower.

I was not thrown from the window, nor

left out in the wilderness, dirt-poor,

to moan and sigh, and cry some more.

Not I. I marched from the front door,

turned left to town, and breathed the air.

And yes, I met a lovely boy

who fills my heart with lasting joy.

For he is blind, I'm glad to say

to my lack of long gold hair.

There have been some lovely Rapunzel poems here already. And still she called to me. 
(The form is based on Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott', whose circumstances were similar.)