Rue Is a street in Paris
A Lily in your memory
A Rose for who I was
Carnations on graduation day
And Tulips just because
Take me back to Paris
Take me back to you
Before life had cut me crimson
And you painted all my gauzy grey
A lovely shade of blue
Cut flowers in the window
A reflection in between
Who’s that woman in the window?
Can’t be heard;
She can’t be seen
A memory blooms within me
A tiny, jagged thing; cuts like longing
Slowly
Slowly
Drags me down into the weeds
Oh, the ruthlessness!
Oh, the stoicism they asked of me
And I in rue — once evergreen
Would you make me Lavinia?
Idle hands and untold grief.
Author’s Note
Lavinia, as referenced above, is a character from Titus Andronicus, the first tragic play ever written by William Shakespeare. She is daughter to the titular character and widely admired for her beauty, youth and virtue. Lavinia is quickly caught in the cross hairs of one power struggle and at-least one revenge plot. At the end of Act II she enters, “Her hands cut off and her tongue cut out and ravished” (2.4.0). Her assailants taunt her, “So, now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak / Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and ravished thee” (2.4.1–2). Not only is Lavinia violently assaulted and stripped of her virtue, she is silenced — ruined forever and unable to speak her grief.
