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[a google dot com image]


PARAMOUR
Gentle breezes, touching cheeks; fingers of sun rays, putting to shame every master painter, stroking in warm colour, on faces, lifted, like praise worthy palms; a sensuous wind drafts by, lifting skirts in magical sweeps, of windy-gesturing-Eros.

sunlit daybed strewn -
lo! bougainvillea shrouded
in veined scarlet bracts,

PARAMOUR © gillena cox 2016


Written for Brendan MacOdrum's prompt at
Sunday Mini-Challenge: The Paramour


Brendan says "The first written poetry of our Western tradition began in Greece between the seventh and sixth centuries BC. Standing at the border of the preliterate, poets like Archilochos and Anakreon found an alphabet in which to ferry verbal expression into the symbolic language of the mind. The act transformed culture and history and who we are. (The literate is now disappearing behind visual culture, borne by wordless ferry-workers.)

Where were the first literate poets going when they wrote their song down? It wasn’t to philosophy or myth; instead, they dazzled to the arrow-thwocks of erotic love. Sappho, another of the first poets of the literate age, wrote:

Eros, once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, stealing up...

For this challenge, lets go back to the edge of that forest and name the paramours who led us to write. Let’s celebrate the badness of that defining encounter which has inspired our best work. Celebrate them individually or serially, angelically or down and dirty—swamp-prime"