One Poem by Daphne Wilson

 

The Muse 

 

The Muse is in my street again today, 

behaving oddly, irrationally 

with no pretence at civility. 

She rudely quizzes my neighbours 

and peers into my garden. 

She looks through my bins. 

What is she searching for? 

Finally, she spies me 

and makes a beeline right into my kitchen. 

 

She scowls at me and demands to know 

‘Why I’m not writing?’ 

What business is it of hers anyway? 

She flicks through my gardening magazines, 

tutting. 

She tosses aside a lovely novel I’m enjoying. 

I even saw her glance, in a most disapproving way, 

at my iPad and Bible. 

She has no manners. 

 

She is ‘attired’ in a garment 

made of words, 

and when she moves paper scales 

skitter from her to the floor. 

I also think the words are moving 

though I’m quite afraid to look. 

Around her there’s a seeping sound  

dripping from her garment 

of murmuring, crying and singing. 

 

And she smells. 

Of what you ask? 

Byres, wet fields of potatoes,  

Jeyes fluid, hospitals 

cigarettes, school changing rooms 

and cold, empty churches. 

She is a smoking cauldron, 

a miasma of memory, 

base notes - nothing sweet. 

 

Is she not supposed to be lovely, inspiring? 

But she is not. 

Nor will she leave. 

She hurls my phone at me 

(for this is how I write) 

and, disconcertingly, settles down 

muttering, smouldering,  

still shedding words 

lasering me with her accusatory glare.  

‘Write’.

 

Daphne Wilson is an emerging writer from Belfast. She has had poems published in Causeway Magazine, which features writing in both Gaelic and English, from Ireland and Scotland. Much of her poetry examines themes of change in the natural landscape and in her own life.