Something Different today~

Food for thought- a poem- view this poem through the lens of feminism- and think of "The Book of Myths" as The Book of Man, from which women are largely absent. Ask yourself how this applies to adoption- and our place in it- thought provoking indeed~

Diving Into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it’s a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers crippling me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived there
swaying in their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or week

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway in this threadbare beauty
the ribs of disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative hunters.

This is the place,
and I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body

We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
Obscurely inside barrels
Half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the ones who find our way
back to the scene
carrying the knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Adrienne Rich