GoForThisWorld

Recited by SpokenVerse.

Here’s the story of a fight with YouTube’s prudishness. Although the fight ended happily, it is alarming that YouTube simply ignored all the protests to their prudishness from viewers! The happy ending required the influence of the press.

Incidentally, I hear the poem involved in that story, Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje, as a rebuking, perhaps a gentle rebuking, by a maiden to a timid man. Here’s the text:

        The Cinnamon Peeler
        by Michael Ondaatje

        If I were a cinnamon peeler
        I would ride your bed
        And leave the yellow bark dust
        On your pillow.

        Your breasts and shoulders would reek
        You could never walk through markets
        without the profession of my fingers
        floating over you. The blind would
        stumble certain of whom they approached
        though you might bathe
        under rain gutters, monsoon.

        Here on the upper thigh
        at this smooth pasture
        neighbour to you hair
        or the crease
        that cuts your back. This ankle.
        You will be known among strangers
        as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

        I could hardly glance at you
        before marriage
        never touch you
        --your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
        I buried my hands
        in saffron, disguised them
        over smoking tar,
        helped the honey gatherers...

        When we swam once
        I touched you in the water
        and our bodies remained free,
        you could hold me and be blind of smell.
        you climbed the bank and said

        this is how you touch other women
        the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
        And you searched your arms
        for the missing perfume

        and knew

        what good is it
        to be the lime burner's daughter
        left with no trace
        as if not spoken to in the act of love
        as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

        You touched
        your belly to my hands
        in the dry air and said
        I am the cinnamon
        Peeler's wife. Smell me.

Tags: femininity, If, man, masculinity, Rudyard Kipling

Filed under: ShoutOut.