Today's word is
redivivus
I love this word, and I have never read or heard it before. How exciting!
*****
Saturday, 9:45 a.m.
Woo-hoo! Two poems for the price of one! This is what can happen when you spring a new word on somebody and s/he likes it.
The first poem is the first thing that popped into my head after learning this word. It was inspired in part by bad TV absorbed between Netflix shipments, to wit, Masterpiece Theater's recent retelling of the tale of Queen Elizabeth I of England, one of my very favorite historical figures. The inaccuracies and other forms of liberal license I perceived plus, to be honest, insatiable curiosity about her two favorite Roberts sent me running for a fact-checking spree to the internet, where I happened upon this fascinating site: Queen Elizabeth 1 (1533-1603). Reading this site and thinking about all the complexities of this dynamic, enigmatic woman's life got me thinking, as any tragedy will, of that eternal question: What if things could be different?
Gloriana rediviva*
Gloriana rediviva -- who would you be now?
Have you already come and gone?
Were you Eleanor Roosevelt? or Sarah Bernhardt?
Are you me? or that woman's daughter?
What if you had the same life again, fresh?
Would you kiss Robert Dudley, publicly, and full on the mouth?
Would you marry before ascending knowing it could mean your death
in every sense, knowing your life would look smaller if you lived?
Did you decide it would have been worth it after all?
Did you end with regrets, or just sorrows?
On just what terms did you part that first time?
Starting over, what would you do differently?
What would you still do again, and again, 'til time ends?
Where would you see yourself in five years?
What would you hope to accomplish?
Would you dally, with one or a hundred?
Would you choose power, and what kind?
This time, this year, not surrounded by axes
and venal men manipulating them, would you mate?
What would that mean for your kingdom, and what would your kingdom be?
Would you realize you were never really lonely, or that
you would still be lonely, essentially lonely, no matter what?
Would you have Amy Robson's life? Madonna's?
Are you Oprah, or Laura Bush? Are you a Tibetan monk?
Would you ever choose again to be anyone's sun or rose
or lion cub or faerie queen? Are you still a woman king?
Would you be a feminist? Would you still think there was only one god
and it didn't matter what you called him? Would you still think he was a man?
How glorious would you want it, Gloriana rediviva? Would you choose
the sun or the feathers of a sparrow, wax wings or a ladder, a tower
or a plateau, if you had it to do over again, now or then?
And would you choose it now -- or then?
After drafting most of this in my head, I started falling asleep on the couch while watching Mighty Aphrodite (my next Netflix selection). It seems too good a movie to fade in and out of like that, so I toddled off to bed, thinking I'd just post this in the morning.
And then I dreamt. I dreamt so strongly of these people I've never met that when I awoke to my boyfriend's alarm at 5:00 this morning, all I could do was rush over and write down the following:
Redivivi
They have been to the big house
on the cliff overhead
and read its rich history
including that day like this one
when a young British journalist
renowned for her sarcasm
visited, assigned a think piece,
and saw something in that day
that brought her ecstasy of God,
tipped her into her life's work,
sent her into a years-long ecstatic whirl
of study and writing all about joy,
rebirth, and the meaning of the soul,
for the rest of her life,
not as a nun.
It must have come as such a surprise
this flight of glory and meaning,
coming as it did from nowhere,
somewhere she expected to feel stranded,
dropped off in the middle of nowhere
in jeans, a tank top, and disbelief,
with a notebook, a pick-up date,
and an assignment on place
on the edge of nothing
and the Great Sea.
This may have been half its power.
The visitors of this day
lie softly on the hard spring beach
at the base of the cliffs
and also feel the power of this place.
There are the woman, the man,
and there is also his erection
like a third person between them.
They are both proud of it,
but she is too shy to acknowledge it,
so soon, this early,
and he knows this
and wavers in his head
between wanting to plunge it into the cold, rough sand
and nurturing this weight and pressure with affection.
He feels great love right now,
for her and himself.
He would not pierce this moment,
pop this bubble of tentativeness
which is so much of the pleasure
of the new thing
they are creating now.
It's chemistry, and it's magic.
It's choice and free will, and it's also
nothing to do with any of that.
She looks out at the sea
and feels her own trembling, which isn't fear,
so dizzy she can barely lift her head from her arm
to see the water.
He has loved her from the first moment.
He thinks she is so beautiful,
so strong and brave,
and she likes his sea-colored eyes,
big hands, gentle mouth, and open mind.
One of those hands rests now on her hip,
and those soft lips kiss
her sleeveless shoulder spasmodically,
arhythmically, regardless of the pattern
of the falling waves, having only to do
with how the desire for her and the love
-- and they are not the same things,
though they are both here --
move him to feel her,
confirm the wealth of this minute
that he holds.
She believes in his kindness
and his willingness.
He believes in her in his future.
It's as simple as that.
They are not young,
not like that woman who came here
this day, way back then,
and changed in one afternoon
from dark and calloused to
a being of light, and lightness,
and conviction,
and the years have already cost them
and left scars, and doubts.
The years to come will also cost them,
as they cost everyone,
and she is already leaving,
the effects of chemistry
and black biologic magic
already taking her far away,
out beyond the sea,
little bit by little bit,
faster than normal.
It's not that they don't see, or care.
It's this day.
This day will be in all their days,
coloring and flavoring each.
This day will be part of their glue.
Tomorrow they will come again
and maybe walk out a little further,
up the coast or out into the cold waves,
just to see, just to feel.
Everything feels richer in this state.
The leaves will come. The land will change.
The sand will warm, and the waves will reshape it,
tumble the rocks that bind it
and the creatures who live within.
These people will pass into
the history of this place,
maybe written like that woman,
maybe known only to the barnacles and mussels
or the gulls who scout them from above
periodically to see if they have food yet.
Today there are the man and the woman,
big inside, small on the beach,
rolling around like pebbles
in the big wash of new emotion,
neither young,
yet both brand new in each other's love,
together, redivivi.
I find it very ironic that I should be handed a story like this by my own sleeping head. I just got done telling someone that I had to give up on NaNoWriMo after just a couple thousand words (if that) because I discovered that I just didn't have any fiction in me, just true stories and no way to tell them as fiction that didn't feel wrong, like a trick or theft. So two days later, for these fictional people to just appear in my head in the middle of a detailed landscape -- ugh! Such a dirty trick! And my own brain did it to me!
Oh, well. They're probably better off in this poem than they would have been in the bad novel I undoubtedly would have ended up writing. And I love them right now, whereas at the end of a month of crazed noveling about them, I probably would have ended hating the sight of them.
_____
*Note that although the word of the day was "redivivus," I have instead used "rediviva" in the first poem, and "redivivi" in the second. Having studied a bit of Latin and other Romance languages, I do believe both are correct, in spite of the fact that Dictionary.com gave a sample usage of this word about one "Magda redivivus."
See, "redivivus" is a Latin adjective. As such, the ending must change with respect to the subject, at least in Latin. There has long been dispute about whether endings of foreign-derived
adjectives should ever change in English since, generally speaking,
English nouns do not have gender unless they are people or animals. Also, some people feel it snobbish or too particular to even want to change endings in accordance with rules of a language of origin. However, there is precedent. We change the endings of some foreign-derived nouns to indicate that they are plural. Take for example the word "curriculum." An educated person will say "curricula," not "curriculums." The "a" ending is the correct way to indicate that a regular, neuter-gender, Latin noun is plural. And "curriculum" is a regular, neuter-gender, Latin noun.
Meanwhile, even in English, the adjective "redivivus" is a postpositive adjective -- just like it was in Latin. This means it appears after the noun it modifies, just like it did in Latin. This makes it for me a truly Latin word -- truly Latin in spirit -- even when used all these centuries later in modern English.
Consequently, even though it's fussy and prissy and maybe just a tad obsessive-compulsive, "Magda redivivus" -- or indeed "[female] redivivus" -- feels terribly incorrect to me, and I just can't perpetuate what I perceive as the result of sloppy modern editing. (I'm sure I will devise my own forms of sloppiness for others to perpetuate, thank you very much.) Therefore, in both poems I have changed the ending of "redivivus" to match the gender and/or number of the noun it modifies -- just as I would have done if I had written each poem in Latin.
Deal with it. Or argue with me. I'm listening.
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