The Daughter that Fearing Fathers

You who brood on raping Sabine women,
who dream of ramming rods blood-full and juicy
into warm soft unawakened maidens,
graceful, slim, stain-barked young birch trees
or large-eyed nervous-nostriled velvet fawns,
who terrified will yield (discovering pleasure,
you fancy, in your stick’s rough penetration),
know: hate, not love, is the daughter fearing fathers.
Panting weights above arouse but Judiths.
Some unknown night when, trusting, you are sleeping,
pale Judith’s arms will raise up high her blade,
and she whose house was broken into, plundered,
wilt let steel fall and—that to make scores even:
“an eye for eye”—your head for maidenhead.

Doris Wight, who went back to college at 50, is now working toward a PH.D. in comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She has had poetry published in over 140 publications and has written a book of lyric poems.