Five Morself in the Form of Pearls
Edward Lucie-Smith
for William Scott and Erik Satie
1
Personal problem: how to
get over that wall and sink
my teeth into a beauty?
The orchard is a harem -
swelling hips and large bottoms.
You can almost hear them, those
female conversations
about their jewels and children,
about their seeds and raindrops,
new life and how to make it.
2
That
black-and-yellow buzzing -
a nest of guards to punish
the intruder.
Swollen with
stings, you'll regret your boldness.
Ah! the pain of the
half-shut
wounded eye that looked too close
at imprisoned love! It is
not like that. Every wasp
is choosing a bride, palping
flesh and savouring
juices.
3
They are courting their tethered
victims, who
hang by a stem
between air and earth, between
growing and dying. The wasps
walk on the surprisingly
chapped skin, and then probe and probe.
You
expect a convulsive
movement, a tiny outcry
as virginity is lost
while
the wound opens, oozes.
4
how swift the transition
from
favourite to mother!
You would not care, now, for what
this broadhipped
woman offers:
a family of grubs in
an impassive form which has
passed
in a moment from ripe
to rotten. You did not come
in time. 'It is all
over, '
she says, meaning her sweetness.
5
In another part
of the
orchard, and hanging from a
different tree; or perhaps
on a
plate on a table,
squatting there half-titled and
content to wait. It
arrives,
the moment of decision.
They know they are fortunate
to be
thus summoned, looked at,
picked for the preservative
violations of art.
Edward Lucie-Smith was born in 1935 in
Jamaica. He came to England in 1946 and is widely known as a poet, broadcaster,
art critic and journalist. A Tropical Childhood & other Poems (1961) won the
John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize. He has published various editions of
contemporary poetry, works of art history and criticism and a volume of
autobiography.