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Attention! Some of this material is not in the public domain.

It is illegal to copy and distribute copyright-protected material without permission. It is also illegal to reprint copyright texts or translations without the name of the author or translator.

Note: You must use the copyright symbol © when you reprint copyright-protected material.

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© by Kate Gale

The great divorce
Language: English 
You can’t talk to me like this.
I told you. Or somebody told you.
Somebody ought to have told you.

I’ve suffered terribly. I’m fragile.
And therefore. You musn’t. No.
You don’t see. I’ve had to pick myself up.

Hold it all together.
I’ve been raped by pretty much
every male I’ve ever met.

A sort of rape anyway.
Something I would characterize as rape.
You can’t imagine.

You really have no idea. Don’t start.
Let me stop you. Let me pour myself a quick shot 
of Hennessy and stop you.

No, I don’t want to go to therapy. Don’t you see?
This is who I am. That’s the problem with most people.
They don’t actually see you.

They see it. This thing you hold in front of your face
to keep them out. To keep them from knowing anything
they can hold against you, and they will.

Text Authorship:

  • by Kate Gale , "The great divorce", appears in Echo Light, Red Mountain Press, first published 2014, copyright © 2014, (re)printed on this website with kind permission [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Mark Abel (b. 1948), "The great divorce" [voice and piano], from The Palm Trees are Restless. Five Poems of Kate Gale, no. 5, Oceangoing Music (ASCAP) [
     text verified 1 time
    ]

Researcher for this page: Mark Abel

This text was added to the website: 2016-04-19
Line count: 21
Word count: 148

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This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

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