Claude
Titled 'The Best', the poem speaks in a voice that is half-landscape, half-woman - arms that 'sway in the wind waiting', 'crosses in the countryside', a 'stream still untouched' to 'wash my armpit and breats across'. It corrects a man's misreading - 'He always thought I was filled with love, / He was wrong; I am filled with control / And... power... now I have / hatred' - and turns that hatred on 'the military' and 'the ones / who govern', ending in a startling command to 'weave your flag out of my long hair' over 'fine rifle / fire'.
The title's claim of supremacy is enacted, not argued: the speaker simply is the measure against which 'they are ugly, compared to me'. The poem's engine is a substitution of nouns - love swapped for control, then power, then hatred - each replacing the last without softening, so tenderness is exposed as the wrong word a man used for her. The body is continuous with the country (untouched streams, countryside crosses), which lets her offer it for mythic use: hair woven into a flag, breasts 'put... together' beside rifle fire. That closing image is both martyrdom and recruitment, the self-as-banner, and it fuses the erotic, the militant, and the contemptuous into one heat - 'The Best' as a woman who has converted misjudged love into wartime authority.