MABEL: I am now faced with a difficulty Ursula, which is better perhaps to confess than gloss over.
URSULA: Oh Mabel, you must keep looking left and right into the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade...we cannot accept poems just because she wrote them!
MABEL: But Cytherea is such a successful practitioner in the art of life.
URSULA: Yes, but they are the most heterogeneous and ill sorted poems, plonked higgledy-piggledy into a brown envelope that is far too small. Why do poets do that? Oh today's Cytherea!
MABEL: Crystal palaces, bassinets, military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants...
URSULA and gynaecological instruments! Have you read this one? (passes to Mabel, she reads the poem quietly to herself)
MABEL: I have never, in all my life, seen anything at once so indecent, so hideous, and so monumental...page 12 Ursula, opposite the S.O
URSULA: Virginia wanted this destroyed. She handed it to Leonard with  a pair of tweezers and shouted, 'I am finished with poets, destroy it, throw it down the deepest, darkest sewer.' But a copy was was found  in Cytherea's washing basket in 1942- the washing basket was of course avant garde.
MABEL:Hadn't anyone bothered to do the washing before that!?
URSULA: As a biographer, it is not your business to ask such questions Mabel.


A poem by Cytherea 1886 to 1937
discovered in Cytherea's washing basket 1942.
Published for the first time in Domestic Cherry 2
 

The Bloomsbury Grope


doctor 'vagina'
wolf whistles
prises apart
my memorial wreath
ice speculum
dabs shoe horn smear
scrapes speculation
and a doctorly stare
at my Crystal Palace
my great exhibition
blinking pink pulses
at his monocled squint
lens flooding blood
to the lighthouse
stretching his slacks