ΣΑΝ ΣΗΜΕΡΑ. ΟΛΓΑ ΜΠΡΟΥΜΑ

Olga Broumas (born 6 May 1949, Hermoupolis), is a Greek poet, resident in the United States.
Born and raised in Greece, Broumas secured a fellowship through the Fulbright program to study in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania; she earned her Bachelor's degree in architecture. She later went on to earn a Master's degree in creative writing from the University of Oregon.
Her first collection of poems, Beginning with O, contains erotic poems toward her women lovers. Broumas was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1977, the first non-native speaker of English to receive this award. Other honors have included a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University since 1995. She spends her summers on Cape Cod, where she, in the Eighties, founded and taught at a school for female artists called Freehand, Inc. (en.wikipedia.org)


Cinderella

............. ... the joy that isn't shared
.............I heard, dies young.
.............--Anne Sexton, 1928-1974

Apart from my sisters, estranged
from my mother, I am a woman alone
in a house of men
who secretly
call themselves princes, alone
with me usually, under cover of dark. I am the one allowed in

to the royal chambers, whose small foot conveniently
fills the slipper of glass. The woman writer, the lady
umpire, the madam chairman, anyone's wife.
I know what I know.
And I once was glad

of the chance to use it, even alone
in a strange castle doing overtime on my own, cracking
the royal code. The princes spoke
in their father's language, were eager to praise me
my nimble tongue. I am a woman in a state of siege, alone

as one piece of laundry, strung on a windy clothesline a
mile long. A woman co-opted by promises: the lure
of a job, the ruse of a choice, a woman forced
to bear witness, falsely
against my own kind, as each
other sister was judge inadequate, bitchy, incompetent,
jealous, too thin, too fat. I know what I know.
What sweet bread I make

for myself in this prosperous house
is dirty, what good soup I boil turns
in my mouth to mud. Give
me my ashes. A cold stove, a cinder-block pillow, wet
canvas shoes in my sisters', my sisters' hut. Or I swear

I'll die young
like those favored before me, hand-picked each one
For her joyful heart.