Dame Ocupacyon Among the Lymphocytes Poem, by Robert Southwick Richmond, at My poetic side

DAME OCUPACYON AMONG THE LYMPHOCYTES

The Goddess of Fame, according to Skelton’s Garland of Laurell, employs a registrar called Dame Ocupacyon; when one brings her a poem, it is she who decides whether to enrol it in the public records. “Dressed in Susan-coloured satins” will not pass for scrutiny. Dame Ocupacyon knows many Susans. - Robert Graves

It’s not the Susan-color of your hair,

for auburn, black or mouse or honey-color

can be arranged. Rather it is your work,

your search when I would feed among the lilies.

Your lymphocytes in concanavalins,

the small change of your daytime world and mine,

that are not plectra for Apollo’s lute,

are not transformed upon the blue guitar.

And yet these cells and their small mitogens

whose genome is your work, your house, your child,

are what you are and what I know of you,

coursing the chambers of your voyeur’s heart.

Author: Robert Southwick Richmond ( Offline)
Published: December 28th, 2020 19:49
Comment from author about the poem: I wrote these verses in 1980, when I was in love with a woman named Susan, a graduate student in a medical school biochemistry department. – The first two lines evoke W.B. Yeats’s poem For Anne Gregory. – Feed among the lilies: Song of Solomon 4:5. The name Susan is derived from the Hebrew word for lilies. – Lymphocytes in concanávalins: Her research used her own white blood cells, treated with mítogens found in jack beans and pokeberries. – Plectra: Guitar picks, blood cells thought of as disk-shaped, as they appear in a blood smear; similarly small change. – Blue guitar: stolen from Wallace Stevens, of course.
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