Written for:  dVerse Poets Pub-Poetical Spouses  (posted by Kim)
The challenge for this week’s Poetics is to take a character, fictional or non-fictional, and re-write their story from the point of view of their husband or wife.

“Dame Carol Ann Duffy DBE FRSL is one of my favourite modern poets. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and has been Britain’s Poet Laureate since May 2009, the first woman, first Scot, and first openly LGBT person to hold the position.

One of her collections of poetry, The World’s Wife, takes characters, stories, histories and myths that focus on men and presents them from the point of view of the women behind the men, with themes such as sexism, equality, bereavement and birth. From Mrs Midas to Queen Kong, from Elvis’s twin sister to Pygmalion’s bride, she has turned well-known stories on their heads”.

Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy
‘Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed…’
(from Shakespeare’s will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

Here is my attempt:

Written by Virginia Poe

I was haunted by nightmares
of his lost Lenore, and that
misbehaving raven running
rampant across my bureau.
But, I digress. Untidy,
critical, and sharp-tongued
though he was, Edgar did not
come close to his contemporaries
in the art of alcohol consumption.
Yes, I know what they said
about him. My Ed was sweet,
troubled, sought only love
and warmth.

At fourteen years of age,
I was a mature young woman
who knew her own mind. Unkind
people whispered about my age,
and the fact that I was his cousin.
Odd it was, to see my Ed as a writer
of macabre tales and poems. Edgar
was quite the opposite. We had fun
together. He loved to run after me,
and tickle my feet. Those elite snobs
did not even know that he was a superb
chef. Well, I am haunted no longer,
for my life ended before his.
Of this I am glad.

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