Strategy at the Broken Places on the life of Sybille von Schoenebeck Bedford When her Huxley essay casually scripted Nazi Germany as bottomless stupidity she was left severed from wealth, ungrounded. Tangled knots of worry stretched skin taut, shaped her destiny at the broken places. Dangled in seasoned breeze, roots afar, a percentage of self, of privilege, she clung on limb’s thinner end— its bark gray amidst deadly despair— a glass of fine wine in her other hand. Her terminal point: be maimed or killed else choose to vacate before night! Frenzied flight from precarious plight was concealed under masked disguise until she disembarked in a distant land. She penned sharp and discerning books where perception and reality mixed in jagged and patchworked origin stories— transcribed in language’s three-point turns— until vision dimmed, her life’s story spent. Copyright 2021 by Joy Martin
Words and phrases were taken from two poems
“at the Broken Places” 2014
“Strategy” 2021
and from article
The New Yorker April 5, 2021, article p.60:
Puzzling It Out The writer Sybille Bedford never pretended that her life cohered. By Madeleine Schwartz.
Author’s Statement:
I took words and phrases from two poems previously written—at the Broken Places, exploring similarities between emotional and bodily injuries and what happens at those broken places, and Strategy, about two raccoons fighting it out on a high, thin tree limb—and collaged them together with an article in The New Yorker, Puzzling It Out The writer Sybille Bedford never pretended that her life cohered by Madeleine Schwartz, that presented itself when I randomly opened the magazine.
Bio:
Southern-born, Joy makes her home in New England’s Boston area, with memberships in the Newton Poetry Group and the Poetry Society of Virginia. Her poems explore the many facets of life, including her and broader humanity’s place and challenges within it.
30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review
