Medusa’s Wedding

A hiss of hair
uncoils from its lavish cage
of silk and lace, interwoven
with gold and silver threads.

She guards her stare,
lowers turquoise lids,
her coated lashes brush
pale powered skin.

Friends and family
gather in the registry office hall
and she has a sinking feeling,
a foreshadow of tragedy.

Then he’s standing there,
the witnesses beside him,
all with matching corsages
and the darkest sunglasses.

She rises from the chair
and love lights up her eyes;
the murmur in the room becomes a moan
as wedding guests are turned to stone.

Kim M. Russell, 23^rd April 2018

My response to The Poetry School NaPoWriMo prompt for Day 23: Classics

Ali greets us with salve and Χαίρετε today as he’d like us to look to the myths of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration. If possible, we should try to avoid a simple retelling of a well-known legend in its entirety and make it new by doing something different. He says that one way to do this is to explore a small, perhaps overlooked moment, in a larger legend, as Michael Longley does in his poem ‘Laertes‘, which is about the return of Odysseus to his father Laertes. Another is to switch perspectives, as Carol Ann Duffy does in her poem ‘Mrs Midas‘. Yet another is use a snippet of myth as inspiration for a poem about modern life and death, as Jack Gilbert does in ‘Failing and Flying‘, and Danez Smith does in their poem ‘not an elegy for Mike Brown‘.