It’s a curse to look at things cleanly

Call on Mary’s soul (sickly)
To know the blessing in disguise – it’s wise to
Eat your daily dead

The lucky have grass above
The unloved have the grass below
And, when it’s been raining, stuck in the tread of their shoes

Two in the morning I am one in the bed
Wondering if you were in fact
A kinder king and

I, only the peasant radical
Filled with ideas above her station
Was it so wrong to want

To be filled with so many thoughts
To laugh too loud
To look like a lesbian touching a friend

Sometimes to want a moon ceremony
Once to have suggested blood union
Sat in the bath, she urinates the stain

Yellow swirling and blooming
Almost a miracle of silence
As a tree falls into the crevice of a woman, the seam of her

Beneficent and scrofulous

By Eleanor Jackson

Eleanor Jackson is a Filipino Australian poet, performer, arts producer, cyclist, writer, gal about town, feminist, freewheeler, and friend.

1 comment

  1. Dear Eleanor, I don’t believe I’ve witnessed the term ‘scrofulous’ in a poem since Robert Browning used it in one of his soliloquies about a monk. Love this poem so much; great imagery xxx

Leave a comment

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s