Merrick

By James Lamontagne

Joseph Merrick was fond of quoting from and Isaac Watts’s poem entitled “False Greatness:”

Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul,
The mind’s the standard of the man.

Merrick, better known as The Elephant Man, was a man of dignity who lived his life from the inside out. These poems seek to inhabit that life and to discover that inner landscape of dignity living in the midst of depravity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unsolicited Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370898930

Book preview

Merrick

James LaMontagne

© 2018 James LaMontagne

Published by Unsolicited Press

Dedicated to my wife Karin.

You teach me compassion every day

Proteus Syndrome

When I was thirteen, I rolled cigars

with my one good arm until it gave out.

I was taunted so much

that I used to sleep in the street hungry.

The beatings from father made the perfect misery,

but my head bloomed in a secret place,

an asteroid of lamentations

unpeopled and spared from the hammering.

Mother’s eyes were black with beauty

and white with tusks.

I dreamed she was struck down by grayness and trunks.

Her screams became my screams.

I was born in a cloud of low groaned messages

she kept inside. It was her name and my brothers’

and sister’s names I whispered at night.

John, (Smallpox) William, (Scarlet Fever)

Marion, (Myelitis).

A trinity of owl pellets cast down into the Oakum.

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