Abstract
‘Ich trage meine Minne vor Wonne stumm … ’
How it happened – my body shrinking, like a glacier shedding ice in summer, seeping into the bed of your palm – I’ll never know. It was warm and that was enough, enough to be close to the lines of your hand, new rivers to be crossed, a map to be learnt. Fields emerged like wrecks out of silt, the long strips of you laid in skin too tough to work, though I searched for a place to begin. I let it happen, you carrying me like an exhausted child, insisting this was love, as if it is in sleep we are laid bare, razed stubble, stony earth.
Monstrum
I saw crows heading south, hundreds lifting like black blossom from the fields. Our ancestors read in them stories of what might come, ran fingers along the barbs of feathers, scattered entrails in fire. We sit in cars, still and locked, waiting for the road ahead to clear, furious with wrecks blocking our path. Soon farmers will be stripping back the corn, quietly reading clouds, dim through the chaff, the earth’s skin pulled back, palmistry denied.
Sehnsucht
‘Wohin o wohin du Weltfall der Sehnsucht
mit der Traume verloren Erdreichen’* (Nelly Sachs) Do not take this as an end, as if it is the final step, a return to that forest of innocent trees where doubt’s leaves fall easy as snow. Do not dream of birth from above, as if we were soil for the seed, loam in which is found perfect ground; our beginnings are never without screams. Here is our task: to begin the search again, looking for the trace (a word? a sign?) of news, good news, to sustain us along the path of stone and grit. And if you long to be full, seek the city – our city, the city which is now and yet to come – resisting the straight roads, the safe roads; Scour the ginnals, the lanes which multiply, which flow and stop like prayer; find us watching like pilgrims for first light, hungry for holy ground at last. Be with us, then, as we shall be with you, walking the uncertain way to the feast of wine and bread; and we shall carry you, as you carry us, as we carry the day’s delight. *Where to, oh, where you universe of yearning / With lost lands of dreams.
A poem written in honour of Canon Andrew Shanks on the occasion of his retirement.
The Women
‘So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid … ’
We ran for years, our limbs growing thick with muscle, the balls of our feet crusted with ice, grit, the stuff of earth; scrumping orchards and fields, hedge berries, guzzling wild juice, the snap of bracken and root laying open skin and vein. For decades, for centuries we dared not stop, in search of land where the seed might drop, crack and bloom, where frozen rivers might unlock, flow as they did on the first day, laws forgotten; searching for a place to begin, a table to mill spelt to dust, serve risen bread, torn by you and us. We know your question: from what did we run? Not the tomb, the aloes and myrrh, the sweet dark, we do not fear the nature of wombs. We raced towards another room, vast as earth, where dreams open as flowers do, wait a thousand years for birth, blossom through our wounds. We dream, and we run still.
© Rachel Mann
A poem written to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the ordination of women to the priesthood in the Church of England.