On Reading Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: Fragments

On December 4, 2021December 4, 2021 By dorahakIn Poems, Prompts73 Comments

Sta viator. Stop traveler.
Amabilen conjugem calcas.
Tread upon a loving wife.

“I’ve never read it myself.”
“Tell me.”

On an island
a mahogany bed
shaped like a boat

The extraordinary in
the ordinary: love
in language

Flaubert writing Emma,
who’s trapped
in a familiar broken cauldron

The ordinary in
the extraordinary: language
in love

Only lies of happiness
and unhappiness
(I read it after all)
meet expectations

I am the girl –
the book is the wolf –
believe me

Shay/Fireblossom's The Sunday Muse, weekly picture poetry prompt
Laura at dVerse: "write a Modernist/Post-Modernist Fragment poem"
Sammi's Weekend Writing Prompt, 79 words, "familiar"
Punam's RDP Saturday: "the extraordinary in the ordinary"

The Three Sisters

On March 30, 2018June 20, 2018 By dorahakIn Short FictionLeave a comment

What betrayals do we unwittingly commit in mistaking selfish desires for selfless love? Happy to recommend a newly published fairy tale, “The Three Sisters,” a wise meditation on men, women, and our expectations one of the other. As C. S. Lewis once said, “Sometimes fairy stories say best what needs to be said.”

Once upon a time there were three brothers who lived with their parents in the midst of a vast forest. If there were any other people in the forest, they knew nothing of them, for they found no tra…

Source: The Three Sisters – Metaphorosis Magazine

Charles Dickens & George Frideric Handel: Two Quotes

On May 17, 2017May 18, 2017 By dorahakIn Music, Novels4 Comments

This is a first in my “Two Quote” series, since it sets side by side not only a written quotation but a musical one.

It’s rare when music is mentioned in literature that I feel inclined to dwell much on it but when the writer is Dickens and the composer is Handel, well, naturally I took the bait. Needless to say, the comic nature of poor Bella’s father’s grimly melodious characterization of his marriage took flight. But then Dickens always did have a way of making you literally laugh through your tears, perhaps even his own as he was at the time estranged from his wife.

Our Mutual Friend was his last completed work and, as if in a farewell gesture, Dickens throws into it the unrestrained comic genius and dramatic flair of his first novel (The Pickwick Papers, 1837) which brought him the acclaim he richly deserved. In the excerpt below, the “Dead March” from Handel’s dramatic oratorio, Saul, is made to dance to the sorrowful notes of Reginald Wilfer’s portrait of married life.

Mrs. Wilfer, writes Dickens, “is a tall woman, and angular,” necessarily so according to the matrimonial law of contrasts, her husband being “cherubic.” “It is as you think, R. W.; not as I do,” comprised a part of her deceptively submissive repertoire of aphorisms with which she managed him. Only to Bella, his eldest daughter, is Reginald Wilfer able to relax his guard and venture into unfettered conversation.

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