It was a mother’s heart that wrote Frankenstein.
To galvanise everything that had been taken from her as her dreams did.
To revitalise all her losses with formed words, a creation that survived forevermore.
Three deceased children drumming around her heart,
The unwelcome sacrifice for a work so revolutionary?
It was her resilient spirit and the mourning heart that expulsed its everlasting flame.
The creator of Frankenstein had long been in the making.
Tragedies thrusted upon her female body, the empty bassinets.
Living through grief and pain and poverty and love gone wrong and right.
The plaguing image of a dead mother in the back of her head,
Fates inverted, the sorrows never end.
And it becomes clear that the creature and the monster become exchangeable entities post-mortem.
“Mary Shelley” by Reginald Easton (1807-1893)
