The Basic Plot
I keep forgetting that history
isn’t like the stories I love,
that the man on the scaffold
won’t be reprieved just as
the executioner slips the
black sack over his head—
that Guinevere, tied to the
stake, won’t be rescued by
Lancelot on a white horse,
as the crowd presses in
with all its fiery torches.
And I forget that in real life
things happen that are so
shocking and wrong that—
if I were watching it on
TV—would make me switch
the channel to something more
pleasant. I keep forgetting
that I am not a miracle, that
I have no superpower, and that
all of this has happened before,
and no one has ever survived.
*
Joyce Sutphen is the author of That Other Life (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2023); Modern Love & Other Myths (Red Dragonfly Press, 2015); After Words (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013); and First Words (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010). She teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, and lives in Chaska, Minnesota.
Beautifully done. A poem I wish I’d written.
Powerful, sad. So captivating
True.