Poetry 2017 / 070

Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that recounts a creation myth. It doesn’t have to be an existing creation myth, or even recount how all of creation came to be. It could be, for example, your own take on the creation of ball-point pens, or the discovery of knitting. Your myth can be as big or small as you would like, as serious or silly as you make it.

Lucy Allcott (b1965)

We all have our creation myths

Gods and heroes to populate the sky

or the earth and the Underworld.

I had a friend at college,

the child of a pair of dope-smoking hippies

who thought sex with men was fine

but attachment was too personal for her.

She believed in the Great Old Ones,

who seeded the earth with life from a distant plane

for the purpose of later consumption.

She was destined for great things,

since she could see the Lords of Creation

in a mirror held just so.

She drew them, these lords,

their subordinate creatures who scuttled

between one plane and the next

feeding on dreams and the shallow breaths of sleepers.

She got a first in her Art degree,

travelled the world documenting monsters,

modelling them in wire and clay.

Collections in London, Paris... I still have

the tiny wool and wire maquette she gave me at graduation;

a quadruped with one eye on a long stalk.

Sometimes it blinks.