Katie Sandwina


Some elixir must have coursed
through her veins, to give her the strength
to bend iron bars like plasticine,
hold her own against a stallion's pull.

Eugen Sandow, famed for sheer muscle,
she overpowered, stole his crown with a lift
of three hundred pounds. Adopting
his surname with a feminine twist

just before Barnum & Bailey snapped her up.
A Samson in Delilah's form, she'd swing
her husband around her head as if he were
a rubber doll. made him a human barbell.

Nervous of this role reversal
in an age of corsetted decorum.
her public reassured with pictures
of a dutiful wife, demure at stove or sink.

No weight or man she couldn't defeat,
until at sixty-seven her cells decided
to knock her about, proving victorious,
after they'd wrestled her to the ground.

Stephen Bone

If you have any thoughts about this poem,  Stephen Bone would be pleased to hear them