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