For She Who Never Spoke

(AN ANCESTRESS OF MINE)

April was her name
Felicity would hide
For April came
Where two selves divide.
At Felicity's birth
April manifest.
Felicity,'though christened,
Was by April possessed.
Besides this shame
Felicity was pure,
Completely at odds
With April's fissure;
A crevice, a canyon,
A rock fault so deep
Its incongruous uprush
Put the faller to sleep
And of her imposter
Unable to tell
Each time the ground opened
And Felicity fell.
Daughter of contortion,
An asphyxia begun,
Born to a parson
In eighteen-sixty-one.
A child of ringlets,
Smock and lace,
Painfully timid
and fair of face.
Dreams disallowed
She could not yearn,
Deductions forbidden
She could not learn
unless by rote
An obedience was formed
To keep imaginations
From ever being spawned.
And so came April
This folly to displace,
Igniting in Felicity
All manner of disgrace.
She tore at her clothes,
She tangled her hair,
She showed her this "Other"
Her own to declare
Had she not disappeared
Unaware she was host
To April, her "other"
Her inseperable ghost
Who stalked her childhood
Intermittently defined,
Timidity and purpose
Imperfectly aligned.
Her riddles the secrets
Of a silenced sphinx,
Her vision precise
As the famished lynx,
A hunter determined
Continually prowling
Then eerily poised
Afore the pouncing
Upon the pain
Of a disnamed child;
The true Felicity
Suspended and styled
So passed to April
Whence naught could extract
From this mute maid's
Enigma intact.
Twelve long years
The haunting occured
And then an asylum
Patiently preferred.
The noting of symptoms,
The parson's sad tale,
The arranging for residency
Should all else fail.
He wanted her out,
He could not abide,
This "other", the stranger
The daughter beside.

The demon, April,
Duly lured,
Shamefully dismembered
And Felicity Cured

Of fury.

Subdued, subtracted,
Anonymous pain.
The bland, empty life
Of the certified sane.
But truth is immortal
And April will not die
While its silent growth
Erodes the lie.

How long?

Ten thousand days
And one hundred years
She burrows her sedition
Through progeny of hers.
In daughters of daughters
April, is known,
In her great silence
These words were sown

By April, called Felicity,
An Ancestress of mine.

(November 1992)