for Grevel

For four months
all those Matisse and Picasso women
draped against
plants, balconies, Mediterranean sea, skies
have taunted me
with the beautiful globes of their breasts as I've filled

my emptiness
with pages of scrawl, with fecund May, its floods
of green, its irrepressible
wedding-lace white, buttercup gold,
but failed to cover
the image of myself as a misshapen clown

until you reminded me
that in Greek myth the most revered women
were the single-breasted
Amazons who mastered javelins, bows, rode
horses into battle,
whose fierce queens were renowned for their femininity.

Then recognising the fields I'd fought my way across
I raised my shield
of glistening words, saw it echoed the sun.