Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 2 | Page 56

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timeline of female sexuality, male sexologists of the late 19th century, such as Freud and
Ellis, referred to lesbians as ‘inverts’ and in modern times a woman may be referred to as
‘bird’ by men as a mark of possession. The bird has a fervent magnetism as the narrator
watches this tender love/object aimlessly ‘wander’ and ‘bounce happily’. The narrator then
anthropomorphizes the bird, queerly, when she is sat in a ‘sitz bath’ because she has an
anal fissure. There is quick movement from bottom to top where, when flying, the
contemptuous bird ‘defecates my hair’, there is a bloody disregard which is an act of hatred.
This movement is not unlike Rich’s seasickness, her ‘to and fro’, where ‘Turbulence prompts
her to lose weight/To avoid love’. She is feeling ill because she is avoiding the expression of
her inner self. The hatred the bird has for her potential lover, when her blood flows over her,
is an externalised expression of anger. The bird and the narrator, like Geraldine and
Christabel, are one and the same. Different facets are the Self are being explored in this
poem which gives it its queasiness.
The connection between blood and sin is Biblical and they combine in the Whore of
Babylon figure. Being a ‘whore’ she is the desiring and the desirable, she is the observed
and the observer as the ‘bird’ is. The whore in the Book of Revelation is tarred with the
‘blood of Saints’, she is sinful because of her predatory sexuality.19 ‘Birds’ moves from a
generic female sexuality to lesbianism in the last three lines: ‘Yet I can stroke her/like I would
a young woman,/but we would feel nothing’. There is an ‘empty pride’, something the whore
is associated with, here or vanitas- vanity- when ‘we […] feel nothing’. This is an existential
emptiness, like acedia something has not been done, even when there is activity. This is
passive because it is a fantasy, she ‘would’ if she could, yet she would still ‘feel nothing’. The
negativity of pride surrounds the bird and the narrator where guilt and sin make them feel
‘nothing’.
Poetry has always been a medium to express deep emotion. French feminist
scholars such as Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva see sexuality at the heart of the self and
therefore some kind of personal truth exists there too.

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However, what if one’s sexuality is,

in modern parlance, against dominant heteronormative values? My poetry explores the
conflict between expression and repression. It looks at how sexuality can be related to the
unsaid or unsayable; to disability and internal conflict because of an invisible barrier. There
is continuity in lesbian poetry. From Sappho to Duffy, this type of creative work revolves
around identity and sexuality, with particular regard to the unsayable and voice. The
repressed lesbian voice exists yet is still in conflict with heteronormative values which
continue to dominate societies and individuals. In the below poem, I explore how this
dominance occurs in creative writing. There is always some kind of tragedy associated with

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Revelation 17:6.
See Kristeva’s text Powers of Horror and Cixous’ essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”.

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