Medusa, Preparing to Turn a Man to Stone, Anya Chabria (March 2026)
Medusa, Preparing to Turn a Man to Stone
(Mosaic Floor: Medusa,
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston)
You ask why my poems are locked between my teeth;
dear sir; innocence is perjury and the world
broadcasts my vice, therefore I have no choice
but this mind, this monologue; you say
the world has changed; I must look outside;
you claim I will find towers well beyond Olympus;
green tongues, flushed cheeks, venom on tap;
but windows are for fools; I am stone; the Lady
of Thought offers no space for self-reflection; perhaps
she has none to give; my self-portrait is a mosaic
of shattered mirrors; took hours to make; I adore it so;
any robbery would be such egregious sin; see me
there, a round-faced girl, hardly a knotted misery; so
sweet, so fresh, so gentle; young to the world’s terrors.
dear sir; innocence is perjury and the world
broadcasts my vice, therefore I have no choice
but this mind, this monologue; you say
the world has changed; I must look outside;
you claim I will find towers well beyond Olympus;
green tongues, flushed cheeks, venom on tap;
but windows are for fools; I am stone; the Lady
of Thought offers no space for self-reflection; perhaps
she has none to give; my self-portrait is a mosaic
of shattered mirrors; took hours to make; I adore it so;
any robbery would be such egregious sin; see me
there, a round-faced girl, hardly a knotted misery; so
sweet, so fresh, so gentle; young to the world’s terrors.
How delicate the contradictions, and the paradox slipped in as easily as a knife into a sheath or between the ribs (you have to count them first, to make certain). There is a form beneath form which makes its own echoes from thoughts and images, and does not need rhyme. As a traditional sonneteer, I recognise and acknowledge that this is truly a sonnet.
ReplyDelete