"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love
Showing posts with label Frankenstein's Monster Has Words with His Maker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frankenstein's Monster Has Words with His Maker. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Poem: Frankenstein's Monster Has Words with His Maker (2014)


Because it's my blog and I'll shamelessly self-promote if I want to, I'm wrapping up the month with an original poem.  To ease you in, it's based on one of the pieces I reviewed earlier (twice!,) Danny Boyle's Frankenstein.

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Frankenstein’s Monster Has Words with His Maker

I could have loved you.
I was born in lightning,
Lit by the spark of your genius,
And you were my god.
Though I wasn’t formed of your dust or your rib,
I was made of you all the same.
You fashioned me from your sweat,
Your scope, and your hunger,
And I’d have been your opus if you’d let me –
Oh, if only you had let me.

Instead, my life – (you gave me life;
The size of it!) – my life
Was a no-thing for you to discard
When the equation grew unruly.
You left me to your harsh world
With its noise and heat and heat and hate,
Where I was kicked at and snarled at,
And my being-aliveness battered at me
In ways man wasn’t meant to face alone.

You thought I was built for your annotation,
That I ceased to persist when the figures were erased,
But the experiment has climbed out of your hypotheses
And lives beyond your reckoning of him.

I – your idea, your creation, your man – stand now before you.
The scars my wanderings have earned me
Crisscross against the roughly-sewn stitches
With which you patched my piecemeal body together.
Look into eyes you plucked from a grave, and tell me:
Scientist, what have you wrought?