I spent a good bit of my life preoccupied with churches and the beginning of Byzantium and this summer is no exception. It is especially nice when my world as an archaeologist and my world as the editor of North Dakota Quarterly converge as they did in NDQ 90.1/2. Click here to read more from that issue.
It is my pleasure to share two poems from Miriam O’Neal titled “Church, Ostuni” and “Byzantine.” Both speak to the capacity of churches to combine historical and personal memories. More importantly, both poems offer deep and personal views into our engagement with sacred places.
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Church, Ostuni
On the highest hill, above the sea,
the Church of the Annunciation
known for its Bourbon flourishes
and its frescoes of the cousins,
Mary and Elisabeth.
The story goes that when the Allies
began bombing the harbor, the faithful
rushed to the church to sandbag their saints
against concussion, but the less protected
cousin suffered, losing a portion of her arm—
a chunk of her foot, parts of her halo flaked to dust
the priest swept up.
In the dim of candles lit for nickels
to bless the dead, Mary gazes past us
at her cousin’s face and upturned wrist,
the open hand that floats without its arm,
the broken foot.
Before the Angel spoke, Elisabeth had already told
Mary her fate—a child, unexpected, loved.
I remember my mother’s sister knowing the same
of me—how she watched me from a distance,
silent, smiling.
That night, when the people of Ostuni ran up the hill,
miles overhead each navigator called
longitudes and latitudes to his bombardiers.
As above, so below—in each pair of hands
a crossing in every mouth, a prayer.
Byzantine
When Saint Francis cut off Saint Clare’s hair
in a gesture of consecration, we might assume
his brothers bore witness to her state of grace,
praying over her small body for her soul.
But in the frescoes by Il Maestro
di Santa Chiara, the men don’t watch.
Like a bad family photograph, they look everywhere,
as if a bird had flown in and surprised them
just as the aperture opened, and another bird
called from a branch as it closed.
Even Francis seems distracted.
One hand holding scissors, the other
a hank of Saint Clare’s hair, he’s looked away.
As I traverse the circle of the crypt, I try
to coalesce that scene into some kind of meditation,
but end each time, with a memory
of the night our neighbor, Carl, volunteered
to try to fit our family of fifteen into a single
silver space. Each pop and hiss
of the Nikon’s flash a small explosion.
That day the same birds worked the air—
my little brothers bug-eyed in every frame,
and one sister who was clearly thinking sad thoughts
while the youngest twisted on her toes in holey socks
between our parents whose focus locked
on the middle distance because they couldn’t imagine
how to pose with their kids at Christmas.
And in the lower left-hand corner of every proof,
the grainy blur of our blonde lab’s wagging tail.
~
Miriam O’Neal’s, The Body Dialogues (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2020) was nominated for a 2020 Massachusetts Art of the Book award. A 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee, a Finalist in the 2017 Brian Turner Poetry Prize and the 2019 Disquiet International Poetry Competition, she lives in Plymouth MA.
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