Category: Poems

Medea

I wrote this poem looking 
at Eugène Delacroix’s painting 
of Medea (see below), and then 
I saw women who had left their 
homes to join ISIS taking their 
children with them, and Medea 
became uncannily modern… 


 
 Medea
  
 look!
 how tender the touch
 how in full light
 i hold my children tight
 naked
 my breasts engorged with milk
  
 the cave was our refuge
 on this sunny day
 the wind blowing softly
  
 they were taking a bath
 look!
 those chubby legs 
 bare-bottomed
 little creatures
 naked innocence
  
       —i heard nothing
  
 look!
 how tender
  
 i hold my children 
 tight
  
       —the sword is gold
  
 furious and fierce
 i held them in my flight
Medea, by Eugène Delacroix

Meditation on the Archive

Photo credits Marie Beauchamps
 You take in
 the tables
 the light 
 damped atmosphere 
 no voices 
 but whispers
 the boxes
 rust and dust 
 the smell of 
 old paper
 ancient times 
 coming back 
 after long years of
 just staying 
 un-allowed to 
 speak.
  
 Most people come  
 to find traces 
 of family members,
 genealogy of blood 
 ties is a popular 
 activity, spicing the
 banality of
 existence with 
 ancient roots, hoping to 
 find traces of
 nobility, salvaging 
 a life almost 
 passed with the 
 graciousness 
 of a name 
 to be added to 
 the tree of relatives 
 that no one 
 has known
 —loneliness 
 has many ways to 
 make us move.
  
 You are here 
 to uncover
 but all you feel 
 is burden
 the piles of 
 history
 do not ease
 they confuse
 it’s a fuss
 your hands moist 
 at the beginning
 dry and itchy 
 when you leave.
  
 A train passes 
 outside and you look 
 at traces
 of someone
 who made
 the ministry of justice 
 become 
 the ministry of fools
 Bureau du Sceau
 changed into
 —Bureau des Sots 
 the sounds stay
 but the orthography 
 becomes 
 critique.
  
 You take notes 
 your pencil 
 sharpened
 and you think of 
 the language 
 making up 
 the people —Albert 
 leaving again 
 and again, walking 
 into fugues 
 his urge 
 to travel 
 and come back 
 trapped in 
 the language 
 of medical 
 science, labels of
 multiple 
 personality
 disorder in 
 the order of 
 things. 
  
 And you start 
 to understand why
 genealogy 
 does not lead to
 graciousness 
 but to the existential 
 quest 
 to reconnect 
 what has been 
 disconnected. 

                                        Amsterdam | London, Autumn 2019