
By David Clark Done |
Introduction
All the poems in this book were conceived and written over a period of about two years. At first, they were a body of drafts written without a plan to unite them. Over time, I came to see how they fit together. My purpose in writing them became clearer. I perceived a cogency and made them into a book. It is intended to be a book of “poetry”. These are not essays. My “arguments” do not progress in a linear fashion. The details and incidents described are presented in a historically accurate progression. A little bit of “poetic license” is often taken in books of poetry but it has been my intent to hold this to a bare minimum.
Each poem is meant to shine a light on a singular point or period in human history and tell its story. The subjects selected and highlighted vary greatly. The opening poem, In the Beginning There was Incest, points out the obvious fact that we have seem to have descended from a long line of incestuous relationships.
It doesn’t really matter if we all have one father and mother as the bible claims. or if the truth is that there was a first cell, and we all descended from an event created by a mixture of lighting and chemicals. In either case it follows that our whole world is founded on incest because both theories claim there is one common ancestor who is the starting point for all life.
As the book title implies, this is a collection of poems describing a prison. Its bars are often moral codes, fears, or assumptions we have made about the nature of things and then put into social practice or law. Sometimes I have focused on famous persons, or points in time, or events that have forged these prison bars and left a mark on mankind.
I like to believe that if sex is a “prison” of sorts, we are both the jailors and the jailed. My fear is that we created, and made the prison, and accepted our own bars. If so, we live in a prison of our own making. Thus, the title: “The Gulag of Sex”.
Poem by David Clark Done
The Gulag of Sex
“In The Beginning There Was Incest?”
According to ancient lore
incest is a natural law,
And has been a part of our
Culture since the earliest days
When isolation ruled,
And separation was cruel
causing children to bond
With their own kin.
It was a time that
Allowed man to fill
The empty void of
the world beginning
from the heart of Africa
To the distant outback
exchanging females,
And deepening the pool
By tracing our genetic
Bonds we celebrated the
birthing of the many
generations brought in
unity as the human race,
Intertwined and merged
In the flow of
the river of time!
Dare we exalt in
Early man’s long chain
Of incestuous mating,
And his drive to procreate
In a primal and thorny
garden of hostile lust
knowing that this fire
has fueled the mystery,
and irresistible drive
that separates us from the
vast pulsating sea?
So the poet must ask
If there was a first cell?
A single unit from which
all life came?
One lone issuance
that was created,
and divided
And then split again?
And if is this is really so
How could we ever know
That in the beginning
There was only one?
One first cell, the father,
The mother, a bringer
Of the eternal light
That must shine
In the long book of time.
The Code of Ur-Nammu, The fertile crescent, circa 2100 B.C.
Long before Moses climbed the mountain,
Men lived together obeying laws
they thought flowed from the fountain
head of God, laws they believing were
without flaw, laws claiming
that a woman is a possession
To be kept as property
to be bought and sold,
And made to obey her
Man’s every whim!
All women were slaves,
And all daughters commodities!
Nothing more than an exotic spice,
To be exchanged like tea
And sold in the marketplace!
If one were raped,
Or “used” before her time
She could be paid
Her weight in gold,
to balance God’s scales.
and if her spoiled bud
was opened before its time
She could be devalued and
disgraced, and placed
In public display to be
Put under lock and key
in her husband’s house,
made prisoner of the Code,
To be abandoned and kept
From venturing alone,
baited and defamed,
lost in an untamed world
Where all roads are
Crossed by constant peril,
and the fear of rape.
These were the laws,
Ones that proclaimed a woman
Was fair game when alone
Where she could be used
and made to feel terror!
Feeling wayward and alone
She was the one to blame,
And judged to be guilty
She suffer in shame
Of death by her husband’s hand!
This was the first code,
Known as the code of Ur-Nammu,
Where all women
Carried a heavy burden,
And lived in constant dread!
This was the first law!
Chiseled and carved in stone,
Left to stand in public display!
With Its warning being:
“Never leave home alone!”
