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ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES
Songs of Earth and Light
Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Munster Literature Centre
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the wind that makes your hair grow faster opens a child’s mouth full of strawberry and sand. slow and sure on the scales of the ocean the child’s head outweighs the sun.
inside of the wind— a blister of a church, its walls thicker than the space from wall to wall where the wind shifts shade and light like two rival chess pieces or two unmatched pieces of furniture. inside of the church—such a stillness that when a feather floats down in a fist of dust it becomes a rock by the time it hits the ground.
organ pipes glint like a cold radiator, contained in a case of a carved tree, its branches tied up with a snake. organ pedals, golden and plump, are the tree’s only fruit.
it is all about the release of weight: the player crushes the pedals like grapes underneath his feet. my body, like an inaccurate cashier, adds your weight to itself. your name, called into the wind, slows the wind down.
when a body is ripe, it falls and rots from the softest spot.
only when a child slips and drops off a tree, the tree suddenly learns that it is barren.
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Unter der Lindento Vladek
she folds her arms where one day her chest will fold into breasts, if that’s something women in her family have secured, if theirs hung, and had chapped-elbow teats. she folds her arms because in a house of such shaky uneven walls nobody should be expected to learn handwriting.
her uncle limps, stutters, and winks. the clock's hands fold in a prayer, when he comes to eat a dish bleached in sour cream, to put his chewed bread over her bruised letters. on the verandah steps he likes to lift her up and breathe into her face a german song about russian rivers.
this land and sky are glued together with pressed out guts of a dried butterfly - a one street village with wings of garden to each side. she holds her pen like a spoon. her pursed lips frown at the horizon line.
two lindens keep the kitchen window busy. one day, her uncle sings, whole street of lindens! you will be running to the man who lies in the ripped out belly of his bathtub, when a whole street of linden trees steps out of night like all the women he has ever had, they hold out their own bodies like towels, and whisper: take us, sister, dry him with us.
that’s when she’ll wipe her hands of ink and sweat.
©2009 Valzhyna Mort
Author Links
Video, Audio and Poems at Blue Flower Arts Interview with Mort in the Irish Times Mort at Poets & Writers Magazine
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©2009 Southword Editions and Munster Literature Centre |
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Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus. Her first book of poetry, I'm as Thin as Your Eyelashes, came out in Belarus in 2005. In 2004 in Slovenia she received a Crystal Vilencia Award for best poetry performance. She was the recipient, in 2005, of a Gaude Polonia scholarship in Poland, and, in 2006, of a writing fellowship from Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, Germany. A collection in English, A Factory of Tears, was published in 2008 by Copper Canyon Press. She is currently a poet-in-residence at the University of Baltimore, USA.
