Girl with a Pearl Earring

What's in a Maiden

By: Robert Rendo - Feb 12, 2015

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Behold this golden child,
all innocent and
young and
unblemished.
She not to be more than 14 years old,
yet her visage takes on the wisdom
and awareness
of centuries of her ancestors,
all who toiled in poverty,
war,
opulence,
the free and open market.
Her powers still hidden,
both to her parents and worse,
to herself.
She craves the learning within books
She worships the forms
and curves of letters.
She sees words as wild animate objects
that leap off the page and
get gobbled up by the snapping crocodile
jaws operated
by her mind’s appetite
Her curiosity unbridled and untethered,
She picks up her father’s books
and knows of some hidden, vast forbidden message,
yet she does not decode all the words
still behind the bars
of her own limited
education.
Her torture is not the frustration in reading,
but her own self-knowledge that she is
a young woman of strength and ability,
and simply needs to be shown
She senses her own power
and it angers her
more than it frightens her.
Is she a woman of letters
or a maiden to whose blank pages
will be written upon
by a master . . .