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the poet
Scholar, poet and critic Victoria Moul lives in Paris. Her recent poems, translations and essays have appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, The London Magazine, Times Literary Supplement, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Brazen Head, Black Iris, Bad Lilies, The Dark Horse and New Verse Review. Victoria writes about poetry and translation in her weekly Horace & friends Substack.
the poems
Aubade
Not to awake the birds
I rise in the still dark
The night bus slow to park
Darkling and absurd.
All words have their past
My own come slow to mind
Through fog and fern to find
As worms do throw a cast
Chill in the unknown air
Upon the surface bright
Above and out of sight
And with no conscious care
Except to clear the narrow
Tunnels of thought that run
Blind and too tight to turn
Beneath the old-fashioned furrow
There are no fields built here
No casts, or mast, or leaves
Or only, beneath the plaster,
Rare ears of long-cut sheaves.
Haricots verts
I found a finger in a bag of beans.
It seemed tired; middle-aged, for sure.
The finger of a man who’d seen some things:
Dusted with coarse hair towards the stump,
Although, surprisingly, devoid of blood.
It was thicker than a bean but just as rough
To touch, and not much longer; absurdly I
Imagined it snipped off amidst a bunch
Of bean stems gathered to cut: absurd, because
The beans weren’t trimmed: I still had that to do.
The children were getting hungry so I put
The water on to boil and rinsed the veg,
Set the rogue digit on the counter, but
Quite far back, behind the colander, so
They wouldn’t see it. The police, I thought,
Could wait an hour, no harm. But then, the supper done,
I went back to wash up, and found the finger gone.
Reading Julian the Apostate
on my late father’s birthday
The house that we don’t live in,
the property we sold,
the things we can’t take with us,
the hands we used to hold,
the mansions of our fathers
long lain unexplored,
the denizens of darkness
drifting and unmoored;
the faith we have forgotten,
the things we do not know,
the places we won’t visit:
Bithynia in the snow.
The wisdom of late antiquity,
the gift of a small estate,
Greek with its participles
passing into space.
Constantinople over
the bay among the trees;
Christ in his translations
rising across the sea.
Publishing credits
Aubade: exclusive first publication by iamb
Haricots verts: PN Review 279 (Vol. 51, No. 1)
Reading Julian the Apostate on my late father’s birthday:
Literary Imagination (Vol. 27, No. 3)