Pedagogical Uses for The Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson
1.
The next day I spent at the health food store
Shaking my self at a picnic table
Beckoning back reality
As cowboys cantered by in SUVs
2.
After many weary steps we came to Wachuset, where my Master was; and
glad I was to see him. He asked me, when I washt me? I told him not this
month; he then bid me wash, and gave me the Glass to see how I lookt.
3.
This [body/stanza/country/story] is uncomfortable
What can hold my belongings
My academic aspirations
Chafe against my Lean Cuisines
Beckoning back reality
The work I do:
The man I give my "heart" to:
The way I—
4.
form
assignment no. 1
describe form without using the word form
now use form to prove you (never) said it
5.
Ocean Springs, MS—
John as a boy
Lay down early
Nearly dead of drugs:
[I envy the golden light he removed from the story
golden
what is evil without pain
light acute on the playground, to know the secrets
I remember the
episode like the memory
of a migraine ]
God said give me your hand
I thought of nothing else as
I passed thru 1
6.
form
assignment no. 2
The way I—
*
see you through
a window
a mirror
a locked decade
a door, a door, God, a door:
7.
As available as a motel with vacancies
In my neighborhood, ignored
Opportunity: His hand
8.
I know, I know, there’s a reality behind reality, a terrible form taking place.
9.
I’ve sat here right here and seen the pattern against which death is relief.
You can read people talking about it on the Internet.
I stabbed my chest with my fist, hoping to die from the blow.
Full and distant, the moon laughed—
Everything you’ve done—
10.
The way I drive my car:
The way I do my hair:
The way I place my hands at my side at my hair at my
Side again bite my nails:
Et cetera: &:
Awareness of:
I came to remember from before my life began &:
After that I said, 11., I cannot go through life alone. Hand me a husband,
I mean it. It’s not funny.
12.
To build a form,
a raft
a shield,
for when
13.
In the busy mirror I saw another mirror [in the crowded mirror]
14.
I was utterly hopeless of getting home on foot the way that I came. My
head also was so light, that I usually reeled as I went, but I hope all those
wearisome steps that I have taken are but a forwarding of me to the
Heavenly rest. I know, O Lord, that thy judgments are right, and that thou
in faithfulness has afflicted me. Psal cxix. 75.
15.
I have let myself forget
the four-by-four I knew,
the loops, the square.
It was sort of like a quatrain crossed with an orgasm:
16.
& That I Will Forget It For As Long As I Shall Live & Live & Live Again, Amen.
17.
What is the name of my life
O Lord,
so afflicted,
the red inner devil at the bottom
where I fell with a thud into my life from which I
so afflicted fell
I fell when I fell into my life
is a loss I can’t recover
19.
20.
In the sentence, “how many people do you know who have died?” I am the “one.”
Lucy Biederman is the author of four chapbooks and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Other poems of hers about Mary Rowlandson appear in Unsplendid and The Laurel Review. lucybiederman.wordpress.com