folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
“Only the blood flows, drying quickly,
and as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.”
–
Wisława Szymborska
The sabres are rattling like bones in a bag, this time in Ukraine (no, it’s that other country up there in the corner of the map, a few blinks north of Yemen), and I don’t know what to say to my friend Oksana from Kyiv whose nightclub selfies now have GLORY TO UKRAINE splashed over them. Someone once asked me why I didn’t post my poems on Instagram. Vladimir Putin is on Instagram – see, here he is leaning on one bicep in a Jeep, here he is practicing judo, he is riding a horse, he is cuddling a St. Bernard puppy, thinking about many things and when he thinks he smiles like in a nightclub selfie. Here’s a photo of polar bears colonizing a weather station -- here’s a pic of the birds who cannot land on the oil-slick beach at Callao -- a woman in a blue burqa in Kabul carries free bread – on this site and every site so many large men shake the bars of their existential cages, a tin cup clang, a baby’s rattle, a monkey grinds its organ while the calliope cues another coming catastrophe. Here, Oksana, I have made you a poem.
Late 20th Century English Translation of Fragments from a Letter Written to Sinold of Reinhardsbrunn by Sister Christina of Dalheim, A Women’s Monastery Situated Between Mainz and Worms in Today’s Germany
Dear Brother Sinold,
Forgive this delay… the messenger with your letter was caught
the great flooding rain God sent to Worms
Your ink ran with the rain, so there are gaps among your words, though Sister N did dry it most assiduously by the fire, accounting for the singe.
Though I am devoted, I do not kiss the book.
I shall make the book you request and am most grateful for the parchment, leather, pigment and silk you promise. Kindly send at your earliest.
Tell me of the woman for whom you commission. Pious? Beautiful in the eyes of our Lord? Spends her hours in tapestry, weaving small miracles by thread? Is her husband kind?
Sister N tells me I should not imagine, for the risk is melancholy.
The lapis has stained my teeth… what was once white is now grey with the material of our illuminatory endeavours. Though my smile would scare children, fear not, there are none hereabouts.
By ingesting my art I am more devout than even Geert Grote.
Among our 14 sisters is one who claims God came to her in a dream and now only she may touch the gold.
Even here we cannot escape the world, Brother.
I have one remaining ring to barter with the merchant Isaac when he next makes his way to Rhineland. From Sar-e-Sang to Constantinople and thence to us and beyond. When I think of his freedom, Brother…
But here also I heed Sister N.
I await news. I await your pigments and silk. I await Isaac, the free man.
I await your next missive and pray for dry weather.
Rhonda Douglas is an award-winning poet and fiction author living in Ottawa, Canada.
