Isabella G. Mead

MINERVA

after two versions of ‘The Birth of Minerva’ (1688) by René-Antoine Houasse, as seen on Wikimedia Commons

Draped in bolts of blue silk, 
she steps out of his brow
and scans the anxious crowd. 
Her father sleeping, spent
from his terrible head-
ache, her mother lingering
in a swollen cloud.
Once a titaness, she whispers
the secrets of ecdysis.

Years of expanding
between his ribs, muscling
through brain matter,
sharpening her wit
to the shape of his skull.
How else could she harbour
shield and spear? What con-
tortions of thought must
produce a daughter like her?

 Isabella G. Mead is a poet from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Her debut poetry collection, The Infant Vine, was published in 2024 by University of Western Australia Publishing and shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Island, Griffith Review, Westerly, Cordite, Best of Australian Poems, Anthropocene and Pamenar Press. She lives on unceded Wurundjeri land.

Isabella wrote this about her poem:

I wrote this poem after seeing two versions of the same artwork (The Birth of Minerva (1688) by René-Antoine Houasse) online. In one version, Minerva emerges from the head of her father, Jupiter, from the left, and in the other from the right. It made me think about how we see art through digitisation processes and how ekphrasis can be informed, complicated, and re-imagined when dealing with digital images. I was also interested in ideas of birth and creation – both in the physical sense and in a more creative or artistic sense.