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    AC Benus
  • AC Benus
  • Author
  • 09/21/2021
  • 214 Words
  • 954 Views
  • 3 Comments
Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 

The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Poetry - 13. ...I have slept with many men...

.

The first man I ever loved

Said good bye

and went away

He was killed in Picardy

on a sunny day.

 

I have slept with many men,

wakened in the night

and cried

 

I was marri[ed][…]

sleeping by

my husband’s side

In this night of bliss […]

 

I have slept with many men

wakened in the night

[wakened] in wantonness [?]

wakened in the night

and cried

—Ernest Hemingway[i]

1922

 

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From Hemingway Complete Poems, p. 60

 

 

 

[i] “The first man I ever loved” Ernest Hemingway Complete Poems (New York 1979), ps. 60-61

https://archive.org/details/completepoems0000hemi/page/60/mode/1up

“The first man I ever loved” is the original opening line of this poem. “First” was later crossed out and replaced with “only.” The fragment of this work survives in a single manuscript, where he apparently grew frustrated by the challenges of writing the second and stanzas – or thought better of their explicitness – crossed them out, and obscured at least one word entirely with the black infill of a fish doodle. More doodles followed, although of an arguably sexual nature (a pussycat, snake, fish and a testicular-headed person/creature). Oddly, the Complete Poems (New York 1979), has nothing to say (in print) about this remarkably revealing poem.

_

as noted
  • Love 3
Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 
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AC Benus
On 9/21/2021 at 9:38 AM, Parker Owens said:

How could this have gone ignored in 1979? I wonder what a new editor or biographer might make of it today. That opening stanza breaks my heart. What did Hemingway feel on his heart that day he wrote? And why were the words that followed so much that he could not leave them unsullied? 

Thanks, Parker. I am no particular Hemingway fan, but I know a bit about his biography, and know the man referenced in this poem was a fellow ambulance driver killed in the same WW1 battle that injured Hemingway. He was changed by this loss

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