Here is the cover of Issue 2 of The Jaded Jesters Society, which includes my poem "Fish." I had a really good experience with this literary journal and I highly recommend submitting your work to them if you're a writer :))
You can read this issue here: https://thejadedjesterssociety.com/
I am also going to include the text of my poem in this blog post and talk about my inspiration. Here's what it looks like on the page:
Fish
The pedants
scraped some slugs off the wall
in the garden that the dead ivy
clung to and they offered this
thing to him after his fast, so
he had to hold his nose, but still,
he gagged, and they thought
this was an act—some kind of
schoolboy defiance—when in fact,
he simply could not love
grammarians
They
took his book away,
and left him only fish when
he needed the Stoics to deal with this,
Yet those austere sops made sure he
never quite forgot what he was—
a bastard—when they drew up
some tables of words they wanted
to make him learn, and it made him
think of
his friend,
He remembered him with fondness,
A memory that dispelled the darkness,
Now, that was someone who he knew
had a mind like a book that you could
turn the pages of, and the words would
hold wisdom, though in hieroglyphs, but
he was far away
The inspiration behind this poem
I wrote this poem because I was reading about how much Erasmus hated eating fish when he was a young boy at a monastery and that what the monks showed him. I wanted to imagine what that was like for him. Erasmus mocks monks in his works such as In Praise of Folly. He values inward piety but thinks monks are performative, basically. Also, I wanted to write about deep intellectual friendships. The friend referred to here could be someone like Thomas More.
Thanks for reading this!!