Exegesis: The Tempest
- Exegesis: The Tempest
Her father gone 272 days. She attends parties, church, class. People’s faces all around her moving around food and words, and her mother’s face refusing to cave to grief, while she is a ship full of men
near to drowning. While she is a ship breaking apart. While she is Miranda on the shore shouting Father! Father! Father! Don’t drown the men that is me.
Mostly she is in her room dressed in his old shirts. More and more she is Caliban alone while the normal girls get their shipwrecked nobles delivered to their shores.
Her mother in the doorway with a new green dress, a perky Miranda from town, another chore. There’s wood enough within, Hulga answers. (Woods, she amends.) [End Page 36]
“Exegesis: The Tempest” is from The Book of Hulga, a book of poems inspired by Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People.” “In the operation of writing, the hand which holds the pen and the body and soul attached to it are things infinitely small in the order of nothingness.”--Simone Weil
