Joan Murray: One Morganatic Leer (poem)

One Morganatic Leer

You think you complain
of the ugliness of people.
Meet your own bed.
Smell what you said.
Your words, unmitigated, dead,
Sink like a noon sun in the crass tomb
beneath the steeple.

Two feet above the sand,
look down
A tartan shore,
A clan, a clack, a whore,
A mobile open door,
To the dog against the tree,
the brittle mugging clown.

Claws like tumbled fingers here
Stand for hands,
Elastic bands,
Minds and trends.
Thighs sprout here enough to breed
the honor of your morganatic leer.

Joan Murray
(1917-1942)
One Morganatic Leer
from: Poems (1947)

• fleursdumal.nl magazine

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