The Defense of Little Hood Goody
By Rosanna Mecklenburg
Until the dawn of words mirror howling
Illuminations of enmeshed melodies and blessed bays
Rhapsodic urges,
Psalms of life.
Laconic, righteous singsong.
The notes of tragic sacrifice renewing,
Accepting, and allowing sweet delights of poetry
Of marriage and triumph.
Stories of birth, mockingbird tales
Of isolation and lust, chaotic and sinful
Of mankind, flawed and godlike
Of godkind nearly.
Until notes and golden voice
Glisten bare in the virgin pool,
And mother, maiden and maker,
Siren, father and bride,
Child and savior
Emerge as ghostly demarcations of the soul
But of one body, wholly body,
Mythical and rhythmic,
Alive.
Until then, her hymn will decompose.
Pungent and festered, arisen,
She spoke.
Disconsolate over what was once
Commanded
To be seen and not heard
A mound in the dirt.
Pregnant with fruit seed
Little Hood Goody read to Riding Shoes.
She sang to the
Children, the mask, the man behind the curtain,
The melody that made their hearts soar because she loved
Them for they were simple.
She praised the sunlight that warmed
The cherished brown soil and the soft and
Gentle touch of rebirth.
Little hood goody looked and knew
That the darkness had accrued her bounty
In the magic breeze
Her invigorating joy was the only need
Eternity caught in a minute
As they listened to the sweet honey sound
Of a daughter’s innocent grace
In an abundant heaven
Displaced.
The song transformed enchantment
Romantically
And with speed
Young boys danced around their
Handsome steeds.
One hundred fair Dulcineas
Cried gleefully
As the shepherds kept watch over
Triumphal ceremony and
Tears of Frye ecstasy showered on donkeys.
Rejoice, lift your hands into the air and sing
The sweet melody song
Of salvation and chastity, hand-shaking
Celebration’s illuminating,
Jubilation,
Deviation from the beginning
Of wanting to get a head, not an apple
Sang the Ideal matchmaker’s protégée,
Little Hood goody.
And in an exacting melodic moment
A strange new key betrayed
A faint relief
To the madness.
Soundly in the fiddling tune
A note of terror
Resumed and mimed to overtake the
Festive mood.
The arrangement between
Father and groom not wholly completed
Doth made her song the Blues.
Hood Goody turned to the crowd,
Her Siren head hung,
Aged beauty to all good
Wilting in puddles of ice.
Sharp came the insightful notes
From the mournful Lady of flight.
The children, the mask, the man behind the curtain
Took heed to Riding Shoes plight
Asking, dissecting, demanding to
Right
Little Hood Goody.
For they had heard her sing.
Or was it more than that?
Had she sung of them
Late at night, did she cry tears,
Alphabetical smeared elegies,
Goddess-less dirges of iniquitous play?
Violent death and sacrificial bays?
They questioned the traitorous hymns and tragic games.
They shattered her mirror
And the sound went away.
Under white floods
Little Hood Goody turned from the fall
Of the life she loved most and
She laughed with them in the retelling of
The passion and the betrayal.
Corpus Christi she could have named herself while
Forever intertwining
The flesh of fishnet stockings in an erotic embrace
In Sisyphus-like glee turned tragedy, now irony.
It was a dance of unspoken communication
It was a wordless,
Sorrowful sound echoing
Down
In cold darkness, hood goody returned.
It was the dance of war and heartache,
Of weapon dissipation
And human elevation into the spirit
She heard the song of her epic beginning
When she first heard the beat that stole her being
And the purgation of her soul.
Finalizing the final phase of her ritual.
Where meaning is slaughtered
And remains the empty possibility
Of hope.
