Living by the Sword

~Judith and Holofernes

He offered figs and honey. She accepted, sweetly killing him.

They flirted in his tent, no attendants to avert her from discreetly killing him.

He relied on might, dismissed wit, trusted wine

to win her consent. She nodded, smiled, obediently killing him.

He preferred fine silver, heavy goblets, roasted meat

dripping blood. She folded her linen napkin, neatly killing him.

She smiled at his jokes, though slightly, gazed into his glazed eyes,

fingered his lips, smiled again before genially killing him.

With wine and more wine, he grew boisterous, bold, and vulgar,

his words slurred and profane. She raised his sword, obscenely killing him.

He was a general, she a mere widow. He thought her shy, fearful,

submissive. She thought herself sly, womanly, meekly killing him.

Who dominates now, the drunken warrior or the threatened woman?

Does violence stain every victor, even one famous for cleanly killing him?

Judith Years Later

Always someone said she was unwomanly, brash, too

brutally seductive, so she surveyed her weapons,

considered a stewpot, water jug, bricks that held their heat.

Dampened skewers, lamb rotating on a spit, a hill of red

embers sizzling with grease, knobby joints—tibia,

femur—slippery with fat when raw but when cooked dry enough: grab,

grasp, swing. Bones as fierce as death and always

handy near a fire. Too unwomanly, she mused, more like not

impudent enough. But she knew her enemy, the general,

just foolish and cocky enough to believe her guileless.

Knowledge taunts power sometimes yet power seldom

listens to doubt. He wooed nameless women or women whose names

mattered little, women who couldn’t speak his language, whose

names he couldn’t pronounce. He wooed her with wine, grapes, olives,

ordinary wooing as if she were an ordinary woman. Early on her starving people

praised anger, christened it courage. Eating again, they forgot hunger,

quit calling her heroic, whispered how she might

raise another sword if one of them dozed under her blanket. Dying as one

slept, of heart failure or infection, that was proper, but decapitation, one’s head

tumbling to the floor before she grabbed it up, no one risked the spectacle.

Undo history she could not. Unwed herself from vigor, determination, she would not.

Victors rose. Victims lay still, eyes glazed, mouths agape. Nothing

warranted accusations, not even his hot blood clotting on her hands, of her

xenophobic flinch. He looked hardly different from her own uncles. He boasted he

yielded nothing, in that revealing his weakness. Who could question her

zeal when she struck him only once, his own blade as sharp as it needed to be.

A Bedtime Story

Once a woman walked away from Bethulia, her maid following only slightly behind her. They felt weak,

almost limp, for they had eaten very little for many days, and they’d swallowed only sips of tepid water.

Their neighbors curled up in their beds, faint with starvation, so the women possessed not even bread

crumbs to scatter, marking their way back. People said the first woman was beautiful, her dark hair

braided with shining beads and wrapped around her head, her dark eyes bottomless as the sea. What

they said was true, but it was also true that the maid held her own beauty, though few had ever noticed

or given her crystalline beads for her hair or kohl to daub her eyelids. The first woman, whose name it

turns out was Judith, carried a bundle tied with string. Inside the bundle she’d folded her favorite woven

gown, dyed to resemble the sea that lay at the bottom of her eyes. Her maid, whose name no one

remembers, for who would ever remember the name of a maid, carried only an empty sack, perhaps

hoping to return with souvenirs.

After a time, they reached an encampment of their enemies. Now Judith was smart and sly as well as

beautiful, though men seldom noticed her intelligence or suspected her cunning, for they were too

stunned by her beauty and immediately began conniving, every one of them, how to capture her for

themselves. So many powerful men suffer from paranoia, and the others, like the general who

welcomed Judith, are monumentally gullible. He was reasonably handsome, it is true, and powerful

enough to command wealth as well as other men’s envy—some would say fear, but so few men confess

to fear. What other reason could a woman have for entering his tent but to enjoy his grilled meat, his

sweet cakes, his bulky company?

Judith had her reasons, alas. For every sip of wine she tasted, he guzzled a goblet. Let this be a lesson:

drunkenness makes a fool of any prince, warrior, kingpin. The general fell into a stupor as drunken

generals will, his limbs heavy with slumber, his beard thick with drool. His heavy sword hung half-in,

half-out of its scabbard. Judith, never one to miss an opportunity, drew it toward herself, its leather hilt

warm within her palm. Her own arms bulging, she brought his sword down, struck him with a single

blow, watched his neck split, his blood spurt on to her hands, forearms, the tent walls.

She never touched his face, raising his head instead by his coarse hair. She raised his head, then lowered

it into her maid’s bag, and the two women left as they had come, walking across the desert, entering the

walls again of their own town, raising his head again in the sight of his enemies and then raising it higher

to face his own approaching soldiers. They approached no farther. They ran, in fact, away from the

woman they’d all desired. And Judith? She lived, along with her maid, for many years more, quiet and

occasionally bemused.