Victoria Moul

Pindar in the Nursery

My baby’s gums bulge with mounding teeth

Humping raw backs in a whitening line.

I think of the crest of Etna, dark with leaf

And under her Typhon, grinding his spine

Along the full length of a stone bed.

It’s his stirring, they say, makes Etna erupt

And my baby stirs, too, and moans in his cot

Bottom up, hair rain-dark with sweat.

But even monsters must rest; even the clean

Beak of these sharpening teeth. His sucking keeps

Time with my song, then slackens its grip, and between

One phrase and the next, he turns sideways, and sleeps:

Like the eagle of Zeus, one softened wing

Over his head as he sleeps, as I sing.

Victoria Moul is a critic, poet and translator living in Paris. Recent poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in PN Review, Bad Lilies, Black Iris, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Dark Horse, Interpret, The Brazen Head and Ancient Exchanges. She reviews regularly for The Friday Poem and the TLS, with occasional reviews and scholarly publications elsewhere. She writes a weekly Substack on poetry and translation, Horace & friends (https://vamoul.substack.com/).