Medusa

[Just curious as to what people think. I tried to focus on the less familiar aspects of the Medusa myth, so any comments in that area would be particularly appreciated. -K]

Medusa

Here stand I, swallowed by the
rustlings of scales and
darknesses of eyes.
My form, my long slender hands
And moving limbs that once ran
So swift, unheeding, swollen into
Waiting for a birth.
Entwined, coldly, by my hair
As once wrapped around me
Limbs of water, sea-weed flowing locks,
A heart as sharp and hard as coral.
Unarmed walked I into the lives of gods
Unwarned, unhelped, unwise
And now I pay.
The only warmth about me now is sun,
Sun that heats the scales as well and
Sets them all to swaying, swinging
With sliding muscles in their sleeknesses.
No limbs will embrace me again- I am
Embraced instead by tendrils of chill
By cold empty power, the power
To transform, at will, a girl
Lonely, lovely, loved
For her unknowing slight
By cold empty power of
Squeezing, slowly strangling me
Alive. Wish for their deaths,
And all I kill is the warmth of skin,
Clutching hot sharp steel of swords
And fullnesses of shields,
The poison in my glance reflecting off
The mirror scales and
Slaying those who came, I know,
To save me.
To save me from the writhing forms
Inside and out, from the growing twists
Of an ending future in my womb-
From motherhood and household chores
And nursing my half-godly child-
And from the ones twining close as
jailers, cold and hard with ill-begotten power,
My ghosts and my companions,
my snakes.
They came to save me, to hack away
The hair Athena gave me,
to hack away my shame and rage
And free me from all of this-
How I wish one hero's sword would
hold true, not turn with him to stone,
And come, warm still like its forge,
Through all the coldnesses
And end it.