How should we serve tea? Keep house, give birth, turn —
On those not good enough? Not with us ranking.
For learning’s life’s opportunities earned.
Should our daughters be haughty and learn —
Their goal (as ours), to marry well praying,
Teach us teacher, we’re ready to learn.
Are we moralcenters? Ignoring sperns,
Spouse with many beds, mistresses stringing.
For learning’s life’s opportunities earned.
Our value, our husband, children, in turn —
Their children, their marriages bliss bringing?
Teach us teacher, we’re ready to learn,
For learning’s life’s opportunities earned.
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Credit: Crosscurrents Writing Gender – Quote from Virginia Woolf
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Villanelle
“A Villanelle is a nineteen-line poem consisting of a very specific rhyming scheme: aba aba aba aba aba abaa.
The first and the third lines in the first stanza are repeated in alternating order throughout the poem, and appear together in the last couplet (last two lines).”
This picture makes me think of mazes and labyrinths, finding your way through a winding place. I found three good quotes on GoodReads to represent this theme. The movie Labyrinth in no way inspired this, I hate that movie!
Credit: Grace Grandinetti via Upsplash
1.“ [It] became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you’re farthest away when you’re closest, sometimes the only way is the long one . . . That when you seem farthest from your destination is when you suddenly arrive, [it] is a very pat truth in words, but a profound one to find with your feet.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
2. “ . . .A labyrinth has only one path and you merely have to follow it; it’s a symbol of life or, rather, of life and death; labyrinths twist and turn, but they have a beginning and an end, through darkness into light.” ― Ariana Franklin, The Serpent’s Tale
3. “This maze is laid out such that should you step through the correct path, by its end you will have learned the most extraordinary dance, such that any coronation would be proud to see you at the height of its feast, such that any holy dervish would weep and call you his devotion.”― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice
Mandibelle16 
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