Poem

'The Blind Minotaur', a new poem by Judith Bishop

by Judith Bishop •

November 2010, no. 326

Poem

'The Blind Minotaur', a new poem by Judith Bishop

by Judith Bishop •

November 2010, no. 326

Pablo Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 97

Night’s the ground beneath my feet
since I learned to walk with you.
Scented guide with birds and flowers on your breath,

it’s no earth, but a sea we walk across.
These sailors, pulling out from shore,
delivered our desertion.

In this new life of mine,
my heart keeps coming on
its every old error, grassed over

as if natural convexities,
the quickly earthed parts of who I am,
underground until the brass of a song

blew in a resurrection mood.
I’d have eaten you alive, girl,
had you come to me trembling around the spiral wall,

dust closing on your fingertips: and then.
Now your eyes are my dominion
which your feet traverse directly,

and your fingers are the chords that stagger me.

Judith Bishop

By this contributor

Judith Bishop is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Event (Salt, 2007) and Interval (UQP, 2018), and three limited edition chapbooks, including Here Hear (Life Before Man, 2022). A third poetry collection, Circadia, is forthcoming from UQP in 2024. Judith’s awards include the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize forInterval and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2006, 2011). Her poems have been used as lyrics for compositions including Jane Stanley’s ‘14 Weeks’ for the Glasgow School of Art Choir (2023), ‘The Indifferent’ for the Hermes Experiment (2024), Andrew Ford’s ‘Isolation Hymn’ (2021), and Mastaneh Nazarian’s ‘Aubade’ (2019). Judith lives in Melbourne, Australia, and has studied in the United States and Britain. She currently works in Advancement at La Trobe University and is writing a book about AI and human data.