Shame
Ah shame-faced girl! Be a shame-faced girl, that doesn't care. Come dancing blithe-footedly down the green, and earrings and razors in your hands; pile them on [an] altar of sacrifice to the green-eyed gods of life. Pile mascara and makeup and fingernail polish on the altar of life, then sing your thoughtless song, strike the match. Burn it all on the altar of life. Incense for the gods. And as its stench goes light smoke waving skyward to etheral death, there your shame goes with it. Put your shame as well on the altar, and watch it up, gaily, gaily up!
But you must be a shamefaced girl first, before you can burn your shame on the altar of life, and send it on to its eternity in the realm of the dead. How the city of Dis deserves shame!
Shame. Shame. Let us learn to know our shame. The painful illegitimacy of being but half-alive things, divided selves. Shame, of having abandoned dear life, which is our baby—we abandoned our baby! At the steps of the city of Dis, there we left our baby in the dark night, wailing, squealing away. Shameful mothers we are, to have so limply cast off the little sparks of our pre-life wombs, sparks of life. We sent them up as sacrifice to Dis, and got shame for return. Now we must set shame itself on the altar, if we would have our babies back.
For oh, we have lost our childhood, and now we have come to know what price it is. We abandoned ourselves on the steps of Dis; now we want back out. It is not so easy.
Were there a wise owl in the Catalpa tree, he would tell us we had forgotten how to hoot.
