https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42599/the-intruder-56d22134bb3c1

Response to The Intruder by Carolyn Kizer

The Effect of Expectations on the Human Spirit. 

There was a girl who had the mind of a garden. She tended the seeds- preferring the strange to the tame- until they grew. This girl adored her garden and cared for that which inhabited it with such instinctive love that all blossomed, grew, and thrived. For years this sanctuary remained unscathed by the things that outlay her mind, and all of its expectations, so the girl contentedly fed life into her garden.

One day she allowed her garden to be shared with the world, hoping to spread her knowledge and aspirations to others. She was met with resistance and cruel words about her oddities so she quickly shut off her sanctuary. But it was too late. Already a downpour struck her carefully constructed haven and threatened to destroy everything she ever worked for right inside her head. A short time later her shelter’s benevolence had been stung. Nothing was salvageable and the others claimed they had saved her from herself. “You can live like us now, normally,” they stated with eerie cheer slithering through their mouths like odd small snakes. They, unlike her, preferred the tame to the strange. They saw her oddities as if she was a bat whom if she ever was held to a mirror, she would shriek like an old screen door at the appearance of her mind. 

Soon their thoughts started to crawl over her like the metallic beetles she once loved to see in her garden. Her garden, she should stop calling it that. It wasn’t hers so much as everyone else’s. Her once peculiar and strange creations were now mundane and domesticated since they were the seeds that the others gave her to plant. She hurried in the dead of night sloppily placing those seeds in the soil, hoping no one would figure out they weren’t already there. How morose she had become having to lead a secret life that made her feel wild, lost. She had betrayed her past self in order to become like the rest of them. Her wounding passion had left a dark sticky puddle on her heart, unable to fully heal. Some days she wished she could wash and wash the pity from her heart but she knew it was useless, she had conformed to let her mind survive, even if it meant sacrificing her garden, herself. 

Soon she learned not to mourn for that piece of land anymore and was delighted with all things tame and normal. She didn’t see it as losing something but as gaining everything she needed. A little while later she met a young boy, that to her horror, was an embodiment of all that was her past self. The girl was disgusted with this feral creature -this bat– that had come to her life and reminded her of all things evil and malicious that the world had to offer. She decided to pay forward what the others did for her. So she taught him the art of conformity and said, with sickly sweetness in her voice, “You can live like us now, normally.” The boy eventually fit perfectly placed back in society. Just like her. 

In the poem, The Intruder by Carolyn Kizer, I found it to be related to the conformity of an individual based on external pressures. This was extremely evident in the last line “She washed and washed the pity from her hands.” because of how she was pitiful of letting the cat take the dying bat instead of consoling/nurturing the bat back to health due to the fear people have inflicted on grotesque things. In my short story, I adopted that plotline and the general theme of conformity as well as alliteration that was was a frequent literacy used in Kizer’s poem as well.

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