The Fairy Tale

Photo Credit: AlicePopkorn via Compfight cc

We all know the story.

She turns
back to find her mother
devoured by dinner guests.
The bones, the
tree branches.



It is Day 8 in the NaPoWriMo blogging marathon. Today's NaPoWriMo prompt  was to rewrite a famous poem, giving it our own spin. The poem I used is Rae Armantrout's Generation, which has this beautiful fairy-tale quality. Except that I changed the fairy tale and used the Serbian variation of Cinderella, which you can read here under the name of "Papalluga, or the Golden Slipper". When I was a child, I found this story very sinister and, in fact, I still do. In a nutshell, Papalluga is careless and drops her spindle down a cliff, which brings upon her a terrible curse. Her mother turns into a cow. Her father remarries and, of course, he and his new family eat the cow. Papalluga buries her mother's bones and a tree grows from them. It is this magical tree that gives her the new dress for the ball and everything else she requires. The rest is not so different from the story you already know.

This story fits nicely with today's PAD prompt, which was to write a violent poem.