The joke's on me:
Last month I told my classes I was going to stop giving homework assignments this spring.
Well.
We're now in the third week of writing from online prompts.
Last week, the assignment was to write about beauty. About something, someone, some place that's beautiful.
Which got me thinking about Sleeping Beauty, or Aurora, as she's called in some versions of the story.
Why is she beautiful? Is it because she's blond? Nice? A victim?
Here's a draft of what I came up with:
On Beauty
Aurora –
a princess,
beautiful,
not because she is a princess
not because she is rescued and kissed
not because she is fair or female or rich –
beautiful because
she’s alive
and having slept for so long,
she loves everything –
from a shard of toasted almond between her teeth
to the honeyed oak of the spinning wheel against the whorls of her fingertips –
she is now moved by the rolling opulence of blue-gray clouds tinted with amber light
and the gleaming black feathers of the crow’s everyday coat
and the glistening and wriggling worm's skin, pink as a cherry’s petal, in the jeweled grass –
but mostly it’s the heart,
the beating heart
of every being,
even the hearts of those who mean her harm –
that she holds in awe –
not because
she’s a masochist or a fool
but because in this moment she sees
even Carabosse –
the “bad” fairy –
the one who stomped and spit and swore when she wasn’t welcomed –
the one with molting robes and a tongue of rotting meat
and brittle kernels for teeth –
Aurora knows this being, too, once had a newborn heart
that wanted nothing
but to beat in peace,
like butterfly wings rising from a leaf –
oh
Aurora
the princess
awake now
but still dreaming
of massaging the knots of rage lodged between Carabosse’s shoulder blades
until her enemy sighs,
puts away her poisons and plots,
and gradually begins to roll and chirp and lick and purr and arch –
yes
Aurora dares to imagine
Carabosse in front of a mirror, delighted
with the ragged bump on the bridge of her nose
and the syllables of her name that sound
like the rustle of bamboo shielding her hut from a thrash of storms,
like the hush-a-bye swaths of pink stripes in the evening sky
and like the redolent voice of pines
singing in the star-pricked night:
Come, Beauty, come Carabosse,
for you have always been,
will always be,
one
of us.
© 2020 Linda Ferguson
