WEBVTT

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I just thought of another
poem I was going to read you.

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However, I'm going to read this
one and call it an evening.

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This is the last one.

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This is my third try at
this subject for a poem.

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Am I doing that?

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No.

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I tried three times to
write a poem about Mrs. Lot,

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or as she is called Lot's wife.

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She's never given any
other name but Lot's wife,

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and it wasn't until I let her
speak in what seemed to me

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her own voice, that
I got something

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that I was satisfied with.

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And Lot's wife after the
destruction, or during it,

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of Sodom and Gomorrah looked
back as this family was saved,

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Lot and his wife,
and their children.

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As they were fleeing the
destruction, she looked back.

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And because she looked back she
was turned to a pillar of salt.

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And what does that mean, that
wonderful image of being turned

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to a pillar of salt. When I
let Mrs. Lot speak in the poem,

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although this terrible pun was
not in my mind at that time,

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she did turn into a
sort of salty character,

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I have to admit as she spoke.

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And it did occur to me
that in her humanity

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she is the salt of
the Earth, but I

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didn't use that in the poem.

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Now the old interpretation
of the reason

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for the destruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah

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by God, is because they were
so full of homosexuality.

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And there is a later,
more modern interpretation

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that the reason
they were destroyed

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is because they failed,
except for Lot and his family,

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in offering hospitality
to the stranger, which

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is a Greek virtue.

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More of a Greek virtue.

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But I am using the
old interpretation

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for the sake of this poem.

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And that is what Mrs.
Lot is talking about

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as she begins to speak.

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"The Cities of the Plane."

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"Their sex life was
their own business

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I thought, and took
some of the pressure

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off women, who were
treated most of the time

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as merely a man's way of
producing another man.

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And there were plenty
of the other kind.

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The two older girls got
married when they wanted to.

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The riot in front of
our house that evening,

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when a gang of young
queers all drunk and horny

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threatened to break in.

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Yelling for the two strangers,
our guests, handsome as angels,

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to come out and have some fun,
was not intelligently handled

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by my husband to say the least.

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An uptight man, he got so
frightened he opened the door

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and offered to send out
our youngest girls if they

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quiet down and leave us alone.

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Two little virgins,
he told them.

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Now fellows, wouldn't that
be nicer and more fun?

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That made them wild, and they
would have dragged him out

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and mounted him in the
street if our guests hadn't

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managed to get the door shut.

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The two strangers it
turned out were inspectors.

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Don't ask me why for the sake
of a perfect idea of love,

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or of human community.

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All the innocent eyed babies,
and beasts, and birds.

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All growth, both
food and flower.

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Two whole cities, their
innocent bouquets of persons,

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frivolous of air, rollicking,
wry, witty, plain, lusty,

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provident.

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Every single miracle of
life on the whole plane

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should be exploded to ashes.

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I looked back, and
that's what I saw.

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Nobody knows my name.

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My husband and our
two adolescents

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kept their faces turned to the
future, fled to the future.

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Sarah everyone knows,
whose life past menopause,

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into the withered '90s, was
one long obsessed attempt

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to get pregnant, to
establish the future.

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As for me, I lost all
sense of human possibility

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when the cloud grows up like
a blossom over all that death.

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I stood for nameless
women, whose sense of loss

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is not statistical.

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Stood for a while,
then vanished.

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Men are always being turned
to stone by something,

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and Loom through the ages in
some stony sense of things

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they were shocked into.

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I was not easily shocked,
but that punishment

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was blasphemous in piety to the
world as it is, things as they

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are.

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I turn to pure mourning, which
ends the personal life then

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quietly comes to its own end.

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Each time the clouds
came and it rained,

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salt tears flowed
from my whole being.

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And when that
testimony was over,

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grass began to
grow on the plane.

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Thank you very much.

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[APPLAUSE]

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