Lady Macbeth (poem)

Maybe we’ve labeled her

too harshly as an unsainted

mother, a harborer of darkness.

Maybe she didn’t mean it when she said

she’d take her baby’s skull

and bash it into the ground and maybe

she didn’t mean it when she usurped

her husband’s role. I know her


by metaphor alone, not as another

passenger on a bus. Though lofty

in her language, her intent

is by design. Someone else put those words

in her mouth, that steel in her heart.

Her madness lingers on the sticking post

where her husband’s murdered head is screwed.

And maybe, just maybe, something else remains

intact. Maybe she wrings her hands

and gnashes her teeth because she was created


as a villain against her wishes, a greater prisoner

than Lear or the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

She was sprung from the sprig of a playwright’s

pen as the crazed antithesis of Woman.

So maybe, so maybe we should remember

that she loved the way she was scripted

to love, as we all are, and so maybe,

so maybe we should welcome her in.

Maybe we should beg for her forgiveness.