CHELIDONIUM MAJUS 30C
I spun up a phone disk of ninety million names,
and found her in Denver, after forty years,
her bright face, her delicious body,
divorced, an accountant, doing homeopathy.
Told her I had migraines, sometimes bad,
and a little blue tube from France came in the mail,
full of white pills the size of BB shot,
one to be put under my tongue, every day.
I imagine that single flower, that swooping swallow,
alterative, cathartic, expectorant, diuretic,
that celandine diluted into a space
reaching beyond Orion, beyond the Pleiades,
blooming in the void, vision of Georgia O’Keefe,
with a green bud like the flower in the garland
I watched sinking in the sea past Diamond Head
sailing from Hawai’i when I was two years old,
becoming the green light of Orion’s nebula
that started for earth before her face was shining,
whatever it does for my head in the gross world of carbon,
becoming the sweet taste of memory under my tongue.
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Author:
Robert Southwick Richmond (
Offline) - Published: December 18th, 2020 15:08
- Comment from author about the poem: I wrote this poem in 1995 after a high school classmate of mine sent me a tube of homeopathic pills for my migraine. The pills were labeled Chelidonium majus 30C. This herb, sometimes called celandine, is (according to my father's 1920 Dorland's Medical Dictionary, is \\\"alterative, expectorant, cathartic, diuretic\\\", and I borrowed that information into the poem. Like all homeopathic preparations, this one is vastly diluted, so imagined it diluted in a volume that would enclose the Earth and the constellation Orion. "Chelidonium" (say kell-i-DOE-nee-um) is derived from the Greek word for swallow (the bird).
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Comments4
Thank you. I like your poem a lot.
Thank you! I'm learning how to format on this WordPress site. I see that you too have figured out how to defeat the dread middle axis it defaults to!
Until I posted something, I thought everyone on this site was a poetic centrist.
I too fought the default.
The fact that the pills inspired an enjoyable poem is great.
You wouldn't care to expand on homeopathic, placebo and cure, by any chance, would you?
Regards, Dave
Homeopathy in the opinion of connoisseurs of medical quackery is meta-woo, woo to the wooth power. If homeopathy is real, then we have to totally abandon what we know about the nature of matter.
That girl had great boobs, though.
Well thanks - you have clarified the situation nicely now we have the motivation clearly delineated.
Regards Dave
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I'm too busy trying to defeat the middle axis, to comment on much! heehee. Good write Robert.
On MyPoeticSide I've always been able to get rid of the middle axis and get the poem to left-justify, but it sometimes takes several tries. But the one today worked on the first go-round.
But WordPress (which hosts MyPoeticSide) actually has a pretty sophisticated word-processing application. I can get it to indent, and it supports italics. And it appears to have full Unicode support, since I was able to post both pointed Hebrew and Arabic-alphabet Farsi. (Those do display correctly on your screen, don't they?)
I too love guinea pigs, though I don't have any right now, but I used to do the photography for Knoxville Guinea Pig Rescue, and I have a review of Uncle Bobby's Wedding on the Amazon web site.
Thanks Robert. Yes the fonts, etc show up OK on my screen.
I quite like middle axis.
I've enough to do with finding the accent over 'é's in some words - there, I've done it! Very advanced. lol.
Q: How can we tell if guinea pigs are OK? A: They're eating (always!).
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