Some Poetry with Your Coffee
One of my closest friends from my time at Harvard is a woman named
Adrie Kusserow, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School with a Harvard doctorate in anthropology. We met in Widener Library, bonded over the usual grad student aggravations, and have remained friends ever since. In addition to being the mother of two wonderful children, Adrie has gone on to become a remarkable teacher at St. Michael's College in Vermont who's known for her work with modern-day slavery and refugees. (Her husband,
Robert Lair, is working to start a micro-finance bank and an orphanage in Sudan.) Adrie is also a poet, and one of her recent works came out in the HDS alumni magazine. It's lovely, and with her permission, I'm reprinting it here. (If you like it, check out her book,
Hunting Down the Monk.)
LADYSLIPPER, RED EFT
As a child I awoke
to the furiousness of bees.
All morning my mother and I combed the woods
for red efts, trout lily, trillium.
I learned young
the smell of God and soil.
The first time I saw a ladyslipper
I felt embarrassed, the pink-veined pouches,
simultaneously ephemeral and genital,
floating toad-balloons,
half scrotum, half fairy,
half birth, half death.
Without the formalities of church and school
lust and spirit first came to me
as one --
through the potent hips of spring.
But flowers, like fear, once inside me
never lay still --
amidst my restless
stalking of the woods,
I wanted something bulky to thank,
to name, to explain all the impossible grace.
So I dragged my thirsty body
over the hills, into the trees.
I let the plump red efts, orange fingers tiny as rain,
crawl across my neck, onto my cheek,
half reptile, half elf,
half earth, half magic.
Years passed,
spring after spring cycled through me,
again and again I arrived in heaven
through touch,
lust, even, for the wrinkled pouches of ladyslipper,
the soft lemon bellied efts
that waddled pigeon-toed across my palm.
Now I walk my daughter through April’s black mud.
It’s been a long winter,
she hasn’t quite unfurled.
Still, she sticks her ear into the cacophony of crows
above us, the way a dog sniffs
at a tight current of scent.
Across the meadow the peepers
gossip in their giant cities,
salamanders toddle
over the black soil,
back into the cold ponds they think of as mother.
awake, awake
what if, what if
What if God is walking through us,
picking seasons, histories, humans off himself
like milkweed from a sweater,
wading through us,
a slow giant through warm ponds,
feeling the odd tickle of religions
like tangled weeds at his feet.
I watch Ana now in full bloom,
despite the rain, running outside barefoot,
setting up dolls’ nests in the fields,
collecting moles, covering them in leaves,
naming them even though they’re dead.
She skitters across the garden, singing,
she too is learning young
the restlessness of rapture,
the way beauty is hard to sit with,
the way it bends the body into prayer,
the way ripeness must be touched.
Soft black earth of the garden,
she and her brother all fists and toes.
I watch her digging into heaven --
soil, toads, bulbs, buds,
the craning neck of spring --
and all summer
the sweet long green meadows.
