Fairy Narcissist by Cynthia June Long

My mother was a fairy

narcissist,

spinning lies into gold.

My birthright of eternal sleep

she granted at my christening.

I was a changeling,

a wooden stock dressed in dainties,

red bows woven in my bramble hair.

I brewed eggshells:

old before my time.

Go back to your barrow, your sidhe-hill.

Let me eat salad greens and wither,

my flesh like moss,

pining for the shining Otherworld.

Bio

Cynthia June Long is a poet, fiction and nonfiction writer, librarian, and occasional oral storyteller. She is steeped in the heritage of Eire, and as in her first poem, many of her works derive from Celtic folklore. She is thankful for a poetry class at Rosemont College in Rosemont PA for planting the seeds of “After The Labyrinth.” She may be part fey. Please follow her blog here.

Author's note

We all have myths. We have stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Myths are timeless: as long as there are families, as long as there are beautiful sisters, wise and foolish brothers, evil (or dysfunctional) stepfamilies, and our own penchant for seeing ourselves as blessed or cursed—perhaps today we might say “clumsy,” “unlucky in love,” “the smart sister,” or similar—myths have relevance. In my first poem, “Fairy Narcissist,” obviously my mother isn’t literally a fairy, but she was at times equally as self-absorbed. Myth gave me a tool for comprehending her. Edith Hamilton’s one sentence commentary about Ismene, daughter of Oedipus and sister of Antigone, struck me in the depths of my own primordial fears, and I drew compassion upon Ismene as I would unto myself, writing her back into existence. As for Theseus—we applaud his reemergence from the Labyrinth and consider the story done (at least as we learned it in childhood), never remembering the brave woman who defied her father to help him, only to be abandoned. Is that not a very modern tale?