[image from favin.com - original source unknown]
[for the Imaginary Garden With Real Toads prompt:un-fairy tales. Re-posted for Poets United's Poetry Pantry]
She'd been told, of course,
about the princess and the pea:
the girl with such delicate sensitivities
she could feel a pea under fourteen layers of mattresses.
What does it mean, then,
when her bed has concrete blocks in it
and the message is "Get used to it,
you made your bed now lie in it.
What doesnt kill you makes you stronger"?
How strong does a woman
have to be?
In her world, the prince did not come.
There were no glass slippers.
She got stuck in the wrong fairy tale,
the Cinderella one.
But the Good Fairy got the address wrong,
so she has been cleaning chimneys
for way too long.
She feels more like
the aging woman in the Dickens parlor,
draped in spiderwebs,
from waiting for her suitor
for decades.
She is always brushing
those damned cobwebs off her face.
Un-fairytales are her medium.
Definitely.
She has got un-fairy tales down.
She has learned to cut her own way
through the thornbushes
and free herself from her own stone garret.
She has learned to gallop at a high lope
across the fields
on the great adventure of life,
on her own,
with a brave heart for the journey,
no need to be rescued by a knight on a white horse,
clinging limply to his back as he leads the way
forward into Tomorrow.
Un-fairy tales can get repetitive.
One may feel like she is beginning
a new chapter every other week.
It can be exhausting.
And delicate sensitivities?
One needs to toss those overboard
right from the start,
and develop a hearty cackle
and a Can-Do attitude.
But she still Believes,
for all that,
in fairy tales.
