(for Juana ‘La Loca’ of Aragon and Castile)
It was gossip taught me to love him first.
My ladies, how they whispered and they laughed:
behind pale, slender fingers, their tongues would tattle
to press that unlooked for suit inflaming it to burn
forge-bright against my dull and listless days.
By smoking lamps I would study or stitch
until, at last, most sweetly cast adrift,
I would laze on my back as the ocean lulled
and I wondered at the wheeling stars.
Lacking oars and a sextant, I surrendered my ark
to the currents and the pull of the tide
only to wake in the morning, landed high and dry,
with the tracks of salt tears on my cheeks,
a rosary upon my lips and an absence
like a pain between my thighs.
Abigail Elizabeth Ottley Wyatt writes poetry and short fiction from her home in Cornwall in the United Kingdom. Formerly a teacher of English, she left the teaching profession in order to concentrate on her own writing and, since 2008, she has been fortunate enough to have been published in more than a hundred magazines, journals and anthologies all over the world. She is the author of ‘Old Soldiers, Old Bones and Other Stories’ and ‘Moths in a Jar’. Until recently she was co-editor of the online poetry journal Poetry 24. http://abiwyatt.wix.com/abigail-wyatt
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