United Kingdom, (b. 1978)
“My name is Legion: for we are many”
- My favourite miracle – the casting out
- of devils from the cut and howling man
- who lived in tombs above the town.
- It cast them into swine, a panicking that sped
- the herd to drown themselves like lightning
- in the sea. I feel for the townspeople,
- the lawful, who thought the madman unbearable trouble
- until they saw the miracle – and then
- begged the saint (on their knees) to go, godspeed,
- even gave him a boat.
- Then had to eat the pork,
- fished out, boiled down to brawn, for lack.
- Had to watch each other, in fear,
- for symptoms of contagion.
- I think of them when I visit your stink.
- When I reach in bare-armed to pull you from your bed.
- When I suggest sunlight. When clearing up.
- When I talk in a voice even I hate, of hope.
- (New Testament, Mark 5:1-20)
Ramona Herdman won the 2017 Hamish Canham Prize with her poem above. After the win, Herdman was interviewed by Mike Sims of the The Poetry Society about the making of this poem. She said:
Then in summer 2014, after hitting a dry spell, I was using writing exercises to generate poems. I found something online that suggested using a bible story as a start, so I flicked through my bible and came across this very weird story of Jesus casting out demons from a possessed man (or men) into a group of pigs, who then ran into the sea… And somehow, perhaps because I was empathising with the people in the story, it just seemed right to turn at the end to the contemporary story. I felt there was a definite read-across between the biblical idea of demonic possession and how we feel about mental illness, including addiction, now. For me, this was a much better way of approaching the present-day bit, and also allowed me to keep that bit quite ambiguous, which is important to me: I think most families have someone like the “you” in the poem who is struggling with mental illness or addiction or something, so I wanted it to be broad enough to encompass lots of situations.
About the Poet:
Ramona Herdman, United Kingdom, (1978), is a poet and a committee member for Café Writers in Norfolk, UK. Herdman received a BA and MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and within a year of completing her studies she published her first collection, Come what you wished for (Egg Box, 2003).
Her pamphlet Bottle (HappenStance Press) was the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2018 and one of the Poetry School’s Books of the Year 2017. Her book of poems about lust, love and sexual politics A warm and snouting thing was published by The Emma Press in 2019.
Her poems have been published by many magazines and anthologies: Envoi, Staple, The Rialto, Thumbscrew, Reactions, Pretext, Egg Box Magazine and others. Herdman has a new collection, Glut, coming out from Nine Arches Press in August 2022. [DES-03/22]
Additional information:
- Ramona Herdman tweets occasionally @ramonaherdman
- Ramona Herdman at: https://ramonaherdman.wordpress.com/
From the Porkopolis Archive:
- Here is a list of all the poets and artists at Porkopolis.org who have considered the Gadarene Swine.