Jordan Stead returns to our digital pages with a brand new poem with intimate boundaries and epic proportions. ‘Antigone’ evokes the image of the mythic gravedigger to play with ideas of symbolic death and tragedy but, through a juxtaposition of images, Stead creates a bleak space which is fringed with intimations of possibility.
Here I am,
that famed gravekeeper.
From the soil I closed
A body,
The sameness felt from the womb.
Divided into two. Half.
Tragedy fell on the arms
Of a woman; Thebes held
In two paper palms, thin as drum skin.
Ours was crushed by the bootheel.
I stir and wake
To find that body held
By silt –
Hanging on the bed sheet.
Pull them back and see
The stains cling wet to cloth,
doused in morning’s burial shroud.
What do the Fates stir
For me? I see the lines.
A split thing too shining
To die;
What I bury is a madness of my own.
