All rights go to their rightful owners; characters belong to Stephenie Meyer whilst the title of the FanFic belongs to Demi Lovato.
The poetry belongs to Carol Anne Duffy =] Thanks to everyone that has alerted me, added me to faves or reviewed. =]
Enjoy and tell me what you all think; criticism is welcome.
Per week we spend twenty five hours at least, in school. At nine am sharp we have forty minutes of homeroom every day which I have to endure the Mike and Jessica show, full of drama, breaking up and making up. Luckily I have Angela to keep me sane. If an AP class was taken, say English Literature and Composition, it was set after hours, say Tuesday and Thursday, which I shared with Angela who had taken AP English Language and Composition in her junior year.
So my average week consisted of twenty seven hours in school and then spending the nights hanging down on the Rez until late hours, after I had finished my four hours at Newton's, Tuesday and Thursday being my days off; making up for them on a Saturday while Jacob was training at a garage on the Rez along with Embry and Quil.
To breakdown my week I even wrote Jacob out a timetable, which he kept in his pocket and had memorised.
Monday – 9am-2pm school, 2pm- 6pm work, 6pm onwards Rez.
Tuesday – 9am-2pm School, 2pm-3pm AP class, 3pm-6pm homework, 6pm onwards Rez
Wednesday – 9am-2pm school, 2pm- 6pm work, 6pm onwards Rez.
Tuesday – 9am-2pm School, 2pm-3pm AP class, 3pm-6pm homework, 6pm onwards Rez
Friday – 9am-2pm school, 2pm- 6pm work, 6pm onwards Rez.
Saturday – 9am-5pm work, 12am-1pm dinner break, 5pm onwards Rez
Sunday – Free All Day!
I would use my free time on a Sunday to finish any homework that I hadn't finished during the week, to do chores and to email Renee back as well as going over the material for AP such as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that we were also doing English, or Heaney or Duffy, who we were introduced to through a sub teacher, for the poetry section, Austen for the fiction part and Stoppard for the drama part, of which I truly hated.
Duffy, or Carol Ann Duffy as she was known, was new to us all. Her poetry consisted of humour, wittiness and spinning things to a female perspective among other things. She would take tales such as Little Red Riding hood, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and King Kong and then turn them inside out and upside down to reflect a females story and perspective. We had all gotten copies of 'The World's Wife' and I was enjoying flicking through it, some capturing my curiosity.
I took the anthology to the Rez with me, the weekend before Sam and Emily's wedding, so that I was able to spend time with the girls as well as being able to annotate the first three poems in it; little Red Cap, Thetis and Queen Herod. I had fallen in love with Little Red Cap and her actions. This along with the fact that she fell in love with the big bad wolf, of which I could happily relate to.
The four of us were sitting around Emily's kitchen table; Emily, Kim to her right then Rach and myself opposite them. All three seemed to be curious to what I was reading; with their encouragement I read the poem out loud, which consequently had actions from them. Rach laughed and whooped, Em giggled while Kim blushed furiously, a girl after my own heart.
At childhood's end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit's caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.
He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,
red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,
my first. You might ask why. Here's why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
but got there, wolf's lair, better beware. Lesson one that
night,
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn't dearly love a wolf?
Then I slid from between his hairy matted paws
and went in search of a living bird - white dove –
which flew, straight, from my hands to his open mouth.
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with
books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
But then I was young - and it took ten years
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thoughts of trees, that a greying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe
to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother's bones.
I filled his cold belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come, with my flowers, singing, all alone.
Flicking through, I come across a poem; Frau Freud, scanning it I felt a blush creep across my skin while Rach read it over my shoulder trying feverishly not to laugh; she then decided to read it outloud as the guys appeared through the door. She stood on her chair with the anthology in her hands using her 'school teacher' voice stating that all reactions must be saved until the end. Everyone watches her in wonder. Rachel Black was never shy or embarrassed.
Ladies, for argument's sake, let us say
that I've seen my fair share of ding-a-ling, member and jock,
of todger and nudger and percy and cock, of tackle,
of three-for-a-bob, of willy and winky; in fact,
you could say, I'm as au fait with Hunt-the-Salami
as Ms. M. Lewinsky – equally sick up to here
with the beef bayonet, the pork sword, the saveloy,
love-muscle, night-crawler, dong, the dick, prick,
dipstick and wick, the rammer, the slammer, the rupert,
the shlong. Don't get me wrong, I've no axe to grind
with the snake in the trousers, the wife's best friend,
the weapon, the python – I suppose what I mean is,
ladies, dear ladies, the average penis – not pretty…
the squint of its envious solitary eye…one's feeling of
pity…
All the way through this the blush on my face becomes hotter; the guys could barely contain their amusement as she read it. Paul, for once, was speechless at her antics, which admittedly, sort of amused me. Paul was never speechless.
"They're teaching you this in school" Em asked, in some sort of emotion that I couldn't put my finger on. "I suppose there's more similar to this in other poems too?"
I nod, "Yeah, it's there, but there's more to it than that." They wait for me to continue. "Duffy's a bisexual feminist; she uses experiences from her life; like dating Adrian Henri, who was way older than her, to influence her work. She wrote Little Red Cap based on that relationship. She covers things such as sexism, equality, bereavement and birth as well as putting a woman's perspective on things. She changes history and stories into a woman's perspective, she lets the female voice speak out. It's a pretty damn cool thing to read. You all should read it sometime."
Rach throws the book to her brother who catches it, the guy's crowd around him, talking animatedly as he flicks through the book. "Page fifty five for the poem Rach just read." They flick to it, sniggering as they read and reread it. I roll my eyes, some things, happily, never change.
Our guys, no matter how old they look or seem, were still teenage boys, they still laughed at stupid things and found certain body parts highly amusing. To be fair it was a nice reminder of how some things never change; the fact that they were still immature; they just had to hide it when it was needed.
The reason why I have used Duffy in this chapter is because I studied her works last year at AS Level and a fell in love with her work. The World's Wife was the anthology that we used and I kept it despite re-sitting and not taking English Lit. I honestly don't know if you could use duffy in AP Lit, but for easiness for me, I have. There's, obviously, more works than what I have used, more information can be found about her on Wikipedia; but here's a few random facts:
1. Born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1955
2. In 1995 she had a daughter- Ella
3. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University
4. May 2009 she became Britain's poet laureate; a poet officially appointed by a government and is often expected to compose poems for State occasions and other government events.
5. She is the first woman, the first Scot and the first openly bisexual person to hold the position of British Poet Laureate.