February
The Annunciation (1)
I
If you come closer, you’ll see
Tanner depicts Mary
as a whitish girl, sitting
on an unmade bed,
emptied of everything
she hoped for,
(a wedding, a home,
maybe children of her own).
The rug is rucked
to trip her up,
dreams stream from
between her legs like blood,
no sense of rights or privilege
in this slumped submission
before an alien light,
without, within.
Just cost and questions.
I was working on a series of poems inspired by visual representations of The Annunciation through the ages when I first started to play with the idea of short story. What would it be like to be 'the chosen one' in contemporary Britain? From those first ideas grew the characters and some of the themes of The Well.
For more information on Henry Tanner, follow this link to The Smithsonian
http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/tanner/tanner_main.html