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ARTS AND CULTURE

Godiva exposed

  • 25 November 2008

From Lady Godiva and Me

Leofric donates a reliquary to his new church at Coventry: For services rendered, steadfast and loyal, supporting our King in a raid on his mother, the arm of a dead man, Augustine of Hippo: definer of sins, rejecter of women.   God's gift my lovely, rarest of women, companion and lover, councilor, friend, who wakes in the dawn, in our bed, warm beside me, as now and forever, together as one.   The arm of a dead man in a jewel spangled box to place on your altar, to pay for your prayers, for the peace of our souls, to keep her beside me, to keep me from hell, for the service I rendered.   Godgifu: He slipped the robe from off my shoulders. Unpinned my hair, as he did every night, trembling hands, whispering 'later'.   But in broad daylight, in the market square. From expectant alleyways the breeze came fumbling fondling, fingering. So I mounted up and rode   into a dream of silent shuttered houses. Like running widdershins around the church I waited for an outraged God to strike me down   for flaunting breasts and pubic hair. Until, one open window. Only one. A man's face smiling, to prove my courage.   What only Tom saw: The sound of hoof fall in the silence: ice cracking; locks bursting cobbles splitting: grass thrusting shading the grey streets green.   The Sherbourne rising, spilling fresh water sluicing through Cross Cheaping roiling. Eels thrash and muscle   in her wake   ivy and mistletoe spring from house beams flowering towards the light, ash and oak and yew rooting the earth sunlit spring sweeping the town.   Leofric, waiting: You didn't ask me for the moon. I would have wrapped the world around your shoulders. Harrowed hell or pillaged heaven but you assumed I'd let you go, and trust you would return.   The hours between stretched on the rack of your absence. Amongst swift talking ladies' men competing for your hand fear shuffled in the silence.   Devotion didn't cut me from the crowd and love's a cold and lonely place to stand.   Tom: Blinded by her passing, Tom blinks the shadows from his room. 'Come in, sit down.' I have no chairs. 'Hungry?' We could share the one hacked wooden bowl 'You take the only spoon.' Watch out for splinters. Numinous on the pile of rags he calls a bed, her golden hair upon the coat he uses for a pillow? Reflected in her beauty he can see how heavy, sordid, rough-hewn his desire; his ugliness, his lack of grace, his poverty of mind. He will eat her at the plank he uses as a table and kiss the shut eyes of her severed head.

Leofric in old age: If my children, or their children will