Mary Shelley's Babies

Mary Shelley’s Babies

                  Arabella Row, London, March 1815

I dreamt Clara moved.
Her eye lids flickered. So cold,
skin clammy as a new-born kitten.

Frantically, I rubbed her limbs
and warmth spread beneath my fingers
as if I had the gift of life.

                  Venice, September 1818

Fever. Convulsions.
How cruel in a heat wave.

They found me, mute, standing in the hall
holding our second child, dead, in my arms.

I see on the Lido’s desolate shore
the moon blank as her grave.
Waves wash over the unmarked spot,

lost as the drops from our oars
dipping past decaying palaces.

                  Rome, June 1819

If only we had left
before the malarial fogs arose.
Sweat darkens our little boy’s hair
tousled on the pillow. Dearest Willmouse,
no longer will he dance throughout our days.
Darkness spreads over all our lives.

                  Villa Valsovano, near Livorno, late summer, 1819

On the parched summer plains,
I am gravid, like the sunflowers,
brown and withered, turning from the sun.

I lie in the dark of stone walls,
deaf to the grape-pickers’ calls,
unmoved by fire-flies at dusk.

                  The Villa Magni, San Terenzo, near Lerici, June 1822

It’s night and at high tide the sea creeps into our boat-house.
We lie above, listening to the surge and gurgle, to the knocking
of spars and tackle under the floor-boards. I dream of babies,
turning in the tide.

At noon, heat shimmers above the jetty.
Guitar music from Ariel floats across the waves.
I lie, land-locked, retching on the quay-side.

When the haemorrhaging starts, Shelley plunges me
in a bath of ice, but our baby’s life-blood leaches out.

My horizon is ringed by electric arches.
Shelley sees a child who walks on water,
with outstretched arms, radiating light.

Commended in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, 2023.