Sad girl funeral song - Natalie Wang

For Sylvia Plath (CW, Suicidal Ideation)

I think sometimes of how I would like

to be remembered. For loyalty,

for competence, for generosity

to friends, perhaps. For creativity

in the kitchen, for the number

of drafts I would take - and as such

even if the detractors would not agree

on my skill, would not at least at my

seriousness with craft. But I know

what I would be reduced to if things

go the way of my sleepwalking dreams.

There are no more gas ovens

and the undercurrent of our thin rivers

are surely not strong enough to drown

me, no matter how many pebbles

I were to fill my pockets with. But

we do not lack high buildings here.

The call of the ground is a siren that

comes in unceasing waves; sometimes gentle

laps, sometimes strong enough to knock

me over my feet, the same as the pills

that night, but still I am here, if for little reason

other than spite, at the thought that this

would be all I would be remembered for

if I were to follow that call - joining a rank

of women poets, hysterical poets, poets who

had complex lives but with inevitable ends -

reduced to those ends and shamed for them

by the same kind of men in the same

dismissive breath. And worse still

I think about a blank-faced stranger thumbing

through my diary, the letters I have kept,

sending them off to be read by the world

and how everyone then would read them

thinking Fool, poor fool because they would

find then - even if there have been thousands

of books I have read, a hundred topics I am

eloquent in - none of that would matter

because they would find that the only thing

I could write about was you.

Bio:

Natalie Wang is a Singaporean poet. Her book The Woman Who Turned Into A Vending Machine is a collection of poems on metamorphosis, myth, and womanhood. You can find her at www.nataliewang.me. Attachments area