Moira Egan
Winter 2025 | Poetry
Three Sonnets
from "The Furies"
(a heroic crown)
What was the woman doing with the tablet
in her lap? Why did the archaeologists
have to ask? Well, obvious: the voicelessness
a given. Did she not write hymns and sonnets
to sun and moon and blood and distant planets?
Of course you’ve heard the joke: Anonymous
was woman, woman-born, to take the piss;
her silly work: the critics piss upon it.
My friend sent me an essay. “Stamina”
(from Latin, plural, stamen, in the sense
of threads spun by the Fates). Enheduana
persisted: poet, priestess, “ornament
of heaven.” My lord, that which here has been
created no one has created before.
No one’s created quite like this before.
She sits beside the gauzy window, lone,
scrapes at her palette, scrapes down to the bone,
examining her true self in the mirror.
Her eyes are large and clear, confront the viewer.
If these are windows to her soul, she owns
the very elements around her, stone
and fire, earth and air, and brilliant colour.
Who was she then? The Origin of Painting?
“You have to look a model in the face
to apprehend the soul, you have to delve
down deep for truth, to tell that tale on canvas.
You have to look your model in the face,
no fakes, no kindness; truth a kind of grace.”
Self-Portrait as the Second of Three Graces
Self-Portrait as a Disembreasted Saint
Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting
Self-Portrait as Picasso’s Nightmare Faces
Self-Portrait as the Blue of Autumn Skies
Self-Portrait as a Poet at Her Desk
Whose Ghosts Surround Her, Anything But Blessed
Self-Portrait as a Woman with No Eyes
Self-Portrait as the Xanthophyllic Leaves
Self-Portrait as Lachesis, Clad in Black
Self-Portrait as the Adjunct Asst. Professor
a Month Away from Sleeping in Her Car
Self-Portrait as Bloodshot Insomniac
Self-Portrait as the One Who Only Grieves
Moira Egan’s most recent books are The Furies (LSU Press, forthcoming 2025) and Amore e morte (a bilingual new & selected poems, Rome: Edizioni Tlon, 2022). Her poems and essays have been published in journals and anthologies on four continents. Recent work has appeared in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review; Smartish Pace (a finalist for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize); and her poem “Velar,” first published in The Hopkins Review, was reprinted in Best Spiritual Literature (Orison Books, 2024). In 2023, she won the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets for her translations of the poetry of Giorgiomaria Cornelio. She lives in Rome.