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8 Apr 2024
Penny
Ayers
New Moon
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Apr 24th
Mar 25th
How Many Miles
to Babylon?
After an etching
with the same title
by Paula Rego
Why they want to go there,
none of them can remember,
only that there’ll be time to get back again.
So one girl follows another,
each breast pulsing with candle flame,
until lightness tugs at their heels,
tips them star-wards.
It only needs a leap, a stretching out
of arms to be caught up by the dark
and if they have any cares, they see them
whirled away like rag curls on the path below.
Soon the girls are rolling, tumbling,
skirts flying and if they could shout their hearts,
it would be one long hurrah.
To the girls below, still hurrying to catch up
they cry be nimble, be quick,
one leap by moon, another by star,
jump over the candlestick, come far.
When at last their toes dip towards the earth
they’re ready to fall into their rumpled covers
and the moon will softly drop
a word of light on each sky-brushed head.
Behind the poem...
In her introduction to Paula Rego’s etchings of nursery rhymes, Marina Warner suggests nursery rhymes are uncanny. Yet ‘to be uncanny – unheimlich – there has to be an idea of home – heimlich – but a home that’s become odd, prickly with desire’. I love the weirdness of nursery rhymes: the juxtaposition of the everyday and the surreal. Paula Rego explored childhood and the stories she was told ... though not in a sentimental way. She said she painted, ‘to give fear a face’. Her etching, How many miles to Babylon is filled with strangeness, as well as female energy. This made it irresistible to write about.
