Where did your muse come from?
Did it rise from deep down the coal mines
Your father aspired for you to do a man’s work,
But that your mother wanted you to stay away from,
Inspiring you to rise above the grit and ash of the English countryside
Like a phoenix to teach in universities and write and write more about all you saw?
You saw the despair in working men
And anguish in even harder working women.
You saw hope and hopelessness,
And real love and fake love in a brutal world
You saw a world war maim and kill many thousands,
And people buried in what may have been truths or falsehoods.
You wrote Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow
And continued with Women in Love and that grand finale,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
It was labeled obscene and quickly banned,
But eventually recognized for simply being just
Merely many dozens of years ahead of its time.
By then you were long gone,
Having been banished from England
To move from place to place in Europe
And eventually Australia and on to that
American wild west world where you arrived
And made New Mexico your home a couple of years.
All the while you continued writing and writing
Novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, criticisms,
And being the target yourself of much scorn from a society
That could not and would not tolerate reading underlying truths
Of what it actually was or what it pretended to be or what it was not
As it looked in the cracked mirror of the pages you wrote for all to clearly see.
Across the ocean nearly 50 years later a young man
Listened as a rose of a professor who once was a nun
Read aloud your prose and adoringly sang your praises.
I absorbed nearly all your books over the next several years
And even visited your Nottinghamshire hometown to find out for myself
Just where that muse that eventually enlightened many had come from.
Copyright 2026, Charles A. Bruns
Originally published by Noble Mouse Press (St. Lexia and the Lesser Feasts chapbook)
