Shakespeare's Fallen Women
You watch as a woman paces the length of a stage
Pouring out her heart to you line by line.
The lamentations of her sorrow, sickly sweet.
Her words, a rich honeyed wine.
Her soliloquy paints a damning picture
Forced to count the blessings of each breath
To move through life like an apparition,
The art of binding creation to death.
The players of man revolve about the stage
And you watch as the pages of their stories turn
Most of them already dead and buried
Yet, it is one you continue to relearn
You only notice when she’s gone
Her absence like a stab in the heart
Her passion dead and fleeting
A woman that has fallen apart.
What does it mean to fall? To have fallen?
Does it mean to have been left behind?
To be heald back by some indiscretion,
Or else a sin of the mind?
And what of the great fall from grace?
From that pleasant paradise we were in?
The resentment that was held inside
Now a scarlet letter on the skin.
A fallen man, is a noble man
He fell in battle, he gave his life.
His transgressions no more than,
An axe of buried strife.
But a fallen women is sinful,
Immoral, or else, depraved.
She has forsaken her lines,
Her failures forever engraved.
And now that the crescendo is building,
Revealing with it a forked path.
A diverging of the word, fallen.
One now tainted by wrath.
And If all the world’s a stage
Let the players choose their fatal flaw.
Let their tragedies be their own,
The finale of their last curtain call.
And you have to wonder,
When will we no longer be the sums of our sins?
But a fragmentation of words?
Someone who is not lesser than?
