USA

pavlicekmarie@hotmail.com 

At the School for the Deaf, 
Great Falls, Montana

This is their room, a field of walls where the absence of sound
has been pulled through the lathing, rafters, and floor joists.
Here was the place the mothers had sent them, by trains and bus;
they'd crossed rivers and valleys, the mothers' faces contorted
but smiling, arms waving in departure; all this was left
disappearing behind them.  They knew this room was a field set
apart, a country rhyming with no other except maybe the blue
surface of the sky made busy with the movement of clouds or a
plain of waving grasses extending far as the eye could see.
Now what said "good morning" was a flurry of hands framing
the doorway and the fast vibrato made by the wind, mornings they
pressed their faces to the glass, the cold mountain pass air
having threaded a trail before them.

(Previously published in Winners, A Retrospective of the Washington
Prize; pub. 1999, The Word Works, Washington, D.C.)

--from an interview with a teacher of talibs, or seekers (Wash. Post, 9/4/98)

Love’s no song, you say--wrap yourself in cloth, hide

your legs and feet, pray to disappear behind the veil

that masks your face. Whose walls of hate

have we passed through, this dust-choked earth and lock-down sky, a gated

court to which we hold no key?

But cradled within our hips, we tend wells

from which you sprang— Listen! Remember this: Our blood was yours, we cried

in prayer the night we pushed you out, the bridge your shoulders made,

spanned the space between our thighs and, after that, your head

we cupped in warmth, followed by a final push before we closed. To hate

the sight of us is to hate your self.

Now, barring love, what state

will prayer create, a tomb for martyred sons? And our daughters, bred,

you say, to serve, give birth, neither read nor write, shall stay hidden, draped, afraid?

© All Copyright, 2000, Marie Wehrli.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.