Periodicity - Lesbia Harford

[highlyeccentric]

My friend declares
Being woman and virgin she
Takes small account of periodicity.

And she is right;
Her days are calmly spent
For her sex-function is irrelevant.

But I whose life
Is monthly broken in twain
Must seek some sort of meaning in my pain.

Women, I say,
Are beautiful in change,
Remote, immortal, like the moon they range;

Or call my pain
A skirmish in the whole
Tremendous conflict between body and soul.

Meaning must lie
Some beauty surely dwell
In the fierce depths and uttermost pits of hell.

Yet still I seek
Month after month in vain
Meaning and beauty in recurrent pain.

---

Lesbia Harford is my new favouritest. There's a small selection of her poetry in The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse, of which, one is about periods and one is about how she wishes she could kiss more ladies more often. Another one is about a guy named Pat. Her biography, which I linked to above, confirms that she was pretty damn cool. She had a congenital heart defect and later in her life suffered from tuberculosis. She paid her way though law school by teaching art classes and tutoring; she joined the Industrial Workers of the World movement and went to work in a clothing factory; married a boot-factory-worker who was also an artist; and was a founder of the post-impressionist movement in Melbourne. Most of her poetry was posthumously published, either in '41 by Nettie Palmer or in an academic edition in 1985. USyd's put the '41 collection up for free here.

I would like to have *words* with her about the bizarre notion that virgins don't get period pain. Aside from painful personal experience, I'm pretty sure violent period pain was among the symptoms of the nebulous medieval illness 'greensickness', wasn't it?

Comments

[alexseanchai]

My mother, age maybe fifteen (and she says, and I have no reason to disbelieve her, she was a virgin till her wedding day, just after she turned thirty), was told her menstrual cramps would go away after she had a kid.

Five kids and twenty-some years later, she still gets (got? I neither know nor want to know how far into menopause she is) menstrual cramps.

[cursor_mundi]

I was told the same thing, at about the same age. Utter baloney, and it still makes me angry 15 years on.

[clavicular]

How bizarre. How incredibly bizarre. I mean, I like the poem in the sense that the words sound pretty but I just, I keep sitting here being like what.

[highlyeccentric]

Lesbia Harford, I tell you. Observe this fabulous piece.