I promised this afternoon to read a poem about Lott's wife.
It was my third try at writing a poem about Lott's wife
who absolutely fascinates me for some reason or other.
She has no name-- no first name.
She's Mrs. Lott.
[LAUGHTER]
And she turned and looked back at the destruction of Sodom
and Gomorrah and she turned to a pillar of salt. Now,
what does that mean, a pillar of salt?
What does it mean?
And I used for my-- oh, I should say
that I didn't find a version of this poem
that I liked at all until I put it in her voice.
And I didn't-- certainly did not have in mind this terribly
corny pun.
But it turned out that I made her a rather salty character,
as you'll see in her speech.
I didn't have that in mind, believe me.
But I did think toward the end she really
is the salt of the Earth.
This kind of woman is the salt of the Earth.
I used for this interpretation the older interpretation
of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,
which was that they were destroyed because there was
so much homosexuality around.
And there's a later interpretation
of that Bible story which goes something like that.
The reason Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed
is because the inhabitants failed in keeping
to the sort of Greek piety.
I mean, the piety which is like the Greek piety of offering
perfect hospitality to the stranger.
So I don't want to impose my interpretation on you,
but that was the one that was useful for the poem.
And this poem people have called my gay lib poem.
This is called the Cities of the Plain.
Their sex life was their own business, I thought.
[LAUGHTER]
And took some of the pressure off women who--
[LAUGHTER]
Who were treated most of the time
as merely a man's way of producing another man.
And there were plenty of the other kind.
The two older girls got married when they wanted to.
The riot in front of our house that evening
when a gang of young queers, all drunk and horny,
threatened to break in yelling for the two
strangers, our guests, handsome as angels,
to come out and have some fun, was not
intelligently handled by my husband, to say the least.
[LAUGHTER]
An uptight man, he opened the door--
he got so frightened he opened the door
and offered to send out our youngest girls
if they'd quiet down and leave us alone.
Two little virgins, he told them.
Now, fellows, wouldn't that be nicer and more fun?
That made them wild and they would have dragged him out
and mounted him in the street if our guests hadn't
managed to get the door shut.
The two strangers, it turned out, were inspectors.
Don't ask me why for the sake of a perfect idea of love
or human community.
All the innocent eyed babies and beasts and birds, all growth,
both food and flowers, two whole cities, their fabulous bouquets
of persons, frivolous, severe, rollicking, wry, witty, plain,
lusty, providence, every single miracle
of life on the whole plain should be exploded to ashes.
I looked back and that's what I saw.
Nobody knows my name.
My husband and our two adolescents
kept their faces turned to the future.
Fled to the future.
Sarah, everyone knows, whose life
past menopause into the withered 90s
was one long obsessed attempt to get pregnant.
To establish the future.
As for me, I lost all sense of human possibility
when the cloud rose up like a blossom over all that death.
I stood for nameless women whose sense of loss
is not statistical.
Stood for a while then vanished.
Men are always being turned to stone by something
and loom through the ages in some stony sense of things
they were shocked into.
I was not easily shocked.
But that punishment was blasphemous.
In piety to the world as it is, things as they are.
I turned to pure mourning, which ends the personal life then
quietly comes to its own end.
Each time the clouds came and it rained,
salt tears poured from my whole being.
And when that testimony was over,
grass began to grow on the plane.
[APPLAUSE]