I just thought of another poem I was going to read you.
However, I'm going to read this one and call it an evening.
This is the last one.
This is my third try at this subject for a poem.
Am I doing that?
No.
I tried three times to write a poem about Mrs. Lot,
or as she is called Lot's wife.
She's never given any other name but Lot's wife,
and it wasn't until I let her speak in what seemed to me
her own voice, that I got something
that I was satisfied with.
And Lot's wife after the destruction, or during it,
of Sodom and Gomorrah looked back as this family was saved,
Lot and his wife, and their children.
As they were fleeing the destruction, she looked back.
And because she looked back she was turned to a pillar of salt.
And what does that mean, that wonderful image of being turned
to a pillar of salt. When I let Mrs. Lot speak in the poem,
although this terrible pun was not in my mind at that time,
she did turn into a sort of salty character,
I have to admit as she spoke.
And it did occur to me that in her humanity
she is the salt of the Earth, but I
didn't use that in the poem.
Now the old interpretation of the reason
for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
by God, is because they were so full of homosexuality.
And there is a later, more modern interpretation
that the reason they were destroyed
is because they failed, except for Lot and his family,
in offering hospitality to the stranger, which
is a Greek virtue.
More of a Greek virtue.
But I am using the old interpretation
for the sake of this poem.
And that is what Mrs. Lot is talking about
as she begins to speak.
"The Cities of the Plane."
"Their sex life was their own business
I thought, and took some of the pressure
off women, 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.
An uptight man, he got so frightened he opened the door
and offered to send out our youngest girls if they
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 of human community.
All the innocent eyed babies, and beasts, and birds.
All growth, both food and flower.
Two whole cities, their innocent bouquets of persons,
frivolous of air, rollicking, wry, witty, plain, lusty,
provident.
Every single miracle of life on the whole plane
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 grows 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 turn 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 flowed from my whole being.
And when that testimony was over,
grass began to grow on the plane.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]