Poem
Leanne O’Sullivan
SELF PORTRAIT
SELF PORTRAIT
SELF PORTRAIT
This blank paper is the one good thing.I want to fill it with colour, soundlessness
like a heart that shuts with slow murmurings.
I feel myself slipping into that whiteness.
My dumb legs, my red hair pale by moonlight
as I doze into a laudanum pod,
secretly happy, blooming in the night
though the cold surrounds my bed.
This is the woman as God has created her,
this is the woman I am outdoing.
She is a ghost the more I see her.
Her eyes dry against my breath. She is moving
from me into this true radiance while
I stare. I don’t move, the heart stops its flood
of rust and the mirror crackles to sand.
My babe, the brush is slipping from my hand.
© 2006, Leanne O’Sullivan
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Poems of Leanne O’Sullivan
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SELF PORTRAIT
This blank paper is the one good thing.I want to fill it with colour, soundlessness
like a heart that shuts with slow murmurings.
I feel myself slipping into that whiteness.
My dumb legs, my red hair pale by moonlight
as I doze into a laudanum pod,
secretly happy, blooming in the night
though the cold surrounds my bed.
This is the woman as God has created her,
this is the woman I am outdoing.
She is a ghost the more I see her.
Her eyes dry against my breath. She is moving
from me into this true radiance while
I stare. I don’t move, the heart stops its flood
of rust and the mirror crackles to sand.
My babe, the brush is slipping from my hand.
SELF PORTRAIT
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