Brittanie Jones

September 26, 2010

Response to The Women Troubadours

As I read through the poems, I found it hard to grasp the full poetic impact of the words, due to the very literal translation. When I attempted to read through the originals, I found that not having a background in anything, excepting Spanish, made them less than helpful for sleuthing out any of what I felt the translations lacked.

Aside from my issues with the translation, I found a vein of commonality embedded in the work. Because these poems are the only examples of troubadourism that I have read, however, I wasn’t able to determine if the commonality was a theme of the troubadour tradition, an expression common to the women of the era, or a coincidence.

These women seem to take their power in life through courtly love. They seem to not be able to have a choice in choosing their own husbands, yet the way these poems are worded it seems as though they have control in accepting or denying a lover. They play to the medieval ideal of being weak and needing the men, however in some examples its evident that they are still able to end the relationship.

I still find it difficult to make any judgments about the poetry without a broader spectrum of work to choose from. It’s hard to compare and contrast amongst these 23 poems.

Avalanche of Love

Evolutionary Novelty.

Is our love

an evolution?

Through ages of beings

Holding each other in the black

Ape hands laced together

For the first time

Stars shining in the dark eyes of our ancestors

Young chimps climbing trees and dreaming of that strangeness

Growing up into our time

Is the collapsing warmth brewing in my chest

Descendant from another era?

Millenia ago, did hominins lock lips and arms and hands in the dark

Just like we do?

**

Looking in your eyes, I believe that you love me as much as you say.

**

Anchor

I'm tying down memories to you

Anchoring simple things

(Dogs barking

Mac and Cheese

Sweaters

The cold)

Firmly to your hand

Replacing all my past pain

With the way my fingers stretch

Trying to cup your palm

The way my nails feel

Dragging over your back

The way my heart feels

When I try to say

How much I love you.

**

Pinned

You are the pin that fixes my spinning world

A hand hold on a mountain face

An island in a sea of blank faces

If I can hold you

The waves don't feel as hard

If I can whisper my fears

Into the shell of your ear

Than maybe you can filter out

All the poison inside me

Let the putrid oil of pain leak out

Refresh my inner workings with the clean wash

Of your love

You can take me apart

See all my pieces

Put them back together

Around you.

**

Integrated Systems

My skin burns

Feels you across stretches of road

My flesh pulled over that distance

My veins plugged into your heart like powerlines

And yours into mine

Together

Lightening strikes us

Fuses us

Like this

Even apart

We cannot become disentangled

I feel your fingers in mine always

My hair against your face

Your arms around me

Lips always connected

Speaking into each others minds

Our dreams and wishes

Memories

Forge them into one past

So we can make

One future.

Forever

What does the beginning of forever feel like?

How do you know that something good will last into the endless twists and turns, the eagle dance of fate and time plunging forever from the sky?

Its carved into trees, abbreviated, grown over. Your initials next to mine, smiling back at the sun against decades of its rays.

How can I even hope for it?

What does forever feel like?

The beginning of love, those seeds, pressed into the folds of you, pinched in and watered, nurtured. Love is painful. Those seeds expand inside me, digging deeper, stretching towards the outside until I am encased in its branches. The tree is growing out towards the sunshine of our love.

Forever starts painfully slow. Those tree rings are growing around us, so fast at first, our sapling clenches our hearts together, molding them. I can't tell one from the other now.

Apart from you feels like forever. I am an unfinished puzzle aching to be solved. Pieces of you wrap around me and meld with me and when I breathe your breathe I could be thinking your thoughts and you could be thinking mine.

Its been forever since I had a sign that two souls could be made for each other. I flash back to all those wrong choices, those people I jammed myself against, those ill fitted keys that ground and sliced up my insides until I had no tears left, only blood.

It felt like forever, I was walking through hell and projecting love onto those who didn't love me, not as much as you, or maybe even at all. Remembering that is my hell, and you make me remember, because you fold me up into blankets and kisses and bites and heaven. I never knew good, so there was no way of regretting the bad. And yet all that bad lets me appreciate just how good you are.

I just want you into forever. I would take the heart out of my chest and let you keep it safe. We could protect each other's hearts in our locked rib cages. I would never let anyone touch it or look at it, hidden safe inside the tight sheets of my skin. Forever until we step down together into the unknown and that unknown will have to take us together.

Show me what forever feels like. I can make it there if you're holding my hand.