The Woman With Jewels

Lola Ridge 1873 – 1941



The woman with jewels sits in the cafe,
Spraying light like a fountain.
Diamonds glitter on her bulbous fingers
And on her arms, great as thighs,
Diamonds gush from her ear-lobes over the goitrous throat.
She is obesely beautiful.
Her eyes are full of bleared lights,
Like little pools of tar, spilled by a sailor in mad haste for shore…
And her mouth is scarlet and full - only a little crumpled -
like a flower that has been pressed apart…

Why does she come alone to this obscure basement -
She who should have a litter and hand-maidens to support her
on either side?

She ascends the stairway, and the waiters turn to look at her,
spilling the soup.
The black satin dress is a little lifted, showing the dropsical legs
in their silken fleshings…
The mountainous breasts tremble…
There is an agitation in her gems,
That quiver incessantly, emitting trillions of fiery rays…
She erupts explosive breaths…
Every step is an adventure
From this…
The serpent's tooth
Saved Cleopatra.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

52 sec read
107

Quick analysis:

Scheme XXAXXBXXXX XCX CXXABXXXCXXX
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 980
Words 173
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 10, 3, 12

Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge was an anarchist poet and an influential editor of avant-garde feminist and Marxist publications best remembered for her long poems and poetic sequences She along with other political poets of the early Modernist period has been coming under increasing critical scrutiny at the beginning of the twenty-first century more…

All Lola Ridge poems | Lola Ridge Books

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