I have had a poem, Grand Mont, published in Verity La, an online creative arts journal which publishes short fiction and poetry, cultural comment, photomedia, reviews, and interviews. I absolutely love Verity La, which prides itself on showcasing “writing that gets you in the head as well as the gut, that has a point, that isn’t afraid.” My kind of journal!
Grand Mont is a found poem – a poem created from other texts – in this case sourced from one of my favourite novellas, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, by Elizabeth Smart. It’s a passionate account of the author’s tumultuous love affair with the already married English poet George Barker, with whom Smart had four children. The novel has been likened to “Madame Bovary blasted by lightning”, and the poem I wrote based upon it is similarly dramatic.
You can read Grand Mont below, or click here to read it — and many other wonderful things — at Verity La!
Grand Mont
A cat scrambles in the cave of my sex
my heart is infested by desire;
Jupiter has been with Leda
and this typewriter is guilty with love.
Electrified with memories of dangerous propinquity
(to my forbidden lover, beautiful as allegory) I rise
from this jungled bed, virile as a cobra –
my obstreperous shape of shame a colossus
whose snowy thighs soar, obliviously, out of sorrow.