Poem: Samson
"you had taken your vow / long ago, and it had to be kept."
This week, a poem I wrote earlier this year, when I was working on my essay titled A Queer Interpretation of Regina Spektor’s “Samson”. The essay explores how Spektor’s song can be interpreted to be depicting a gay relationship, and I was inspired to write my own interpretation in this vein. I was also working on another essay about Kate Bush’s song “Kashka from Baghdad”, which influenced the poem with its themes of freedom and secrecy.
Samson after Regina Spektor I loved you first. Before the others, even before Delilah - before any of that - there was you and me. There was us. That was what we called it. We spent our days in closed rooms - doors locked, curtains drawn - we couldn’t go outside, we couldn’t be seen together. They would throw stones at us. They said I was the devil. So we stayed inside. We kept as quiet as possible. But at night we would play music, up on the rooftop, singing songs no-one else could hear, laughing into the deaf inky blackness of the sky, stolen light, gone by morning. Your hair was long and braided, and while you slept I would run my fingers through it, as if weaving some kind of magic spell I knew would be broken. No historical record or sacred text will remember us - what we had was not love, only something that looked like it. The churches didn’t approve of us, and one day they came to take you away, said they had a woman for you in some far-off land. Would she love you? Would you love her? It didn’t matter. You said you had taken your vow long ago, and it had to be kept. I couldn’t have you so I became you instead - I crawled inside your skin, animated you from within, I grew my hair long, I became your memorial, your ghost; now I walk these dusty streets, a living statue, a mirage, blind and bound with shame. You came to me once, in a dream, waving at me from a distance, your hands in the air, you were in a boat, drifting away from the shore, where I stood, helpless, watching you, fading, desperate. I wake and still expect you to be there, beside me, but now there is just the shape of your absence, an invisible man, a phantom limb. Where does love go once it becomes forbidden? Do you know that I’m still waiting here, for nothing? How do I escape you?