La Geante, by Ellaraine Lockie

The Giantess, by Rene Magritte (Belgium), 1929-1930.

La Géante (The Giantess)

She’s a lady liberated
from Baudelaire’s poetics
From his tomcat worship of women
For what generation of men over the expanse
of time has not knelt at the feet
of a well-formed naked female
Blown her importance out of proportion
with heavy breath of passion

Turned pubescent in her presence
with the predisposition to explore
her staggering proportions
To seduce her with flowery references to soul
steamy eyes and somber flames
And after the flush of fervor has faded
To lie in sated stupor under the cool
shadow of satisfaction

But Magritte’s woman 
painted a hundred years 
after Baudelaire versified her
appears as no oil-engendered giantess
She stands disrobed and secured in scale
to her domestic surroundings
Oblivious to her dwarfed husband 
watching from a cat’s-eye view
in his business suit

She probably supports 
the European suffragette movement
Cleans house without wearing clothes
Reads Virginia Woolf in English
And has enough certitude to do her own seducing
Growing in the husband’s grateful eyes
to the queenly size of her namesake 

Ellaraine Lockie

Magritte's painting contains the script for the poem, "La Geante," by Charles Baudelaire. Click here to read Baudelaire's poem in French, and a number of English translations as well.

This poem was first published at California Ekphrastic.
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Ellaraine Lockie is a widely published and awarded poet, nonfiction book author and essayist.  Her thirteenth chapbook, Tripping with the Top Down, was recently released from FootHills Publishing.  Earlier collections have won the Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, the Poetry Forum Press Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Contest, the Aurorean Chapbook Choice Award and Best Individual Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England.  Ellaraine teaches poetry workshops and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine, Lilipoh.