The Poetry Stash: 21Mar2024

An Ancient Gesture by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Today’s poem is “An Ancient Gesture” by Edna St. Vincent Millay from the anthology, No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, edited by Florence Howe. The book is available for purchase here.

An Ancient Gesture by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can’t keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don’t know where, for years,
Suddenly, you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.

* * *

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture, —a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.
He learned it from Penelope…
Penelope, who really cried.

Prompts:

1.	Begin with “I thought, as I wiped…”
2.	Begin with “Suddenly, you…”
3.	Draft a poem that includes a gesture like wiping tears from eyes.
4.	Draft a poem that is prompted by a myth.

5. Photo by Ruslan Ataev via pexels.com. Use this image as a writing prompt.

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