The Tuesday Poem: Penelope Dreaming
Penelope Dreaming
He made this bed you know,
crafted first from the aged olive,
then joined to its hoary brother –
its leaves still sing
of winds no longer blowing;
I feel it stir, murmur
in that phantom breeze
when I lie here, as if in your arms
my husband, my beloved, my lover,
waiting for the first light
to ambush me, waiting …
I hear your voice sigh
out of the deep ocean, and sink
with it, down to where you hide,
an apparition spun out of leaves,
silvered bark and light, gnarled
and twisted as Old Man olive,
timeworn, shifting to every wind,
forever slipping away
from my outstretched arms,
my eager touch,
elusive as leaf shadow, dappled
chimaera of heart’s longing.
© Helen Lowe
Published in Broadsheet 7, 2011
Featured on Michelle Elvy’s Glow Worm Blog, March 4, 2014
—
As I said (among other observations) when Michelle featured this poem last year:
“The Ithaca Conversations sequence reflects my long held love of myth and legend … Like all the poems in the Ithaca Conversations sequence, Penelope Dreaming provides a slant into the Odysseus legend, in this case from the perspective of the wayfarer’s wife, left behind on Ithaca with her son, Telemachus. I have long had an interest in Penelope, exploring several perspectives on what her ‘story’ could be. Another of these, titled simply Ithaca, appeared in short story form in JAAM 26, edited by Tim Jones.”
—
To read this week’s poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub, and other great poems featured by fellow Tuesday poets from around the world, click here.