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| Downtown churches celebrate Palm Sunday, corner of 9th and Broadway, Columbia, MO, 2015. Photo by Aliki Barnstone |
A Little More Mindful
—busy yourself with your
daily duties, your loom, your distaff…
for war is man's matter…
—Iliad, Book VI
If I could be a little more
mindful,
groom my dogs’
fur, remember
to shelve my
books, shut the closet
and cabinet doors, hide away
my mess of
clothes and dishes,
and graciously
address every annoyance
(or worse than annoyance),
perhaps
my sandals would
glide up marble steps
and I’d find
myself idle,
holding my peace, my desperate
thoughts left to
themselves
at the bottom of
the hill, while I turnover
in my palm some stones that hold
the spirits of
those who do not cry out
praise for a king
riding a donkey,
clothed in garments his mother
wove,
her design
covering his flesh from birth
until he hugged
his shroud
on a road strewn with rags and
palms
and wept over
the city:
“If
only you knew
on this day those things creating
peace.”
Centuries before his word, their
spirits dwell
in rubble, for
countless wars
knock stone from
stone.
They perished so long ago, their
wanderings
and homes are
the work
of archeology.
Their pots are dust
the Athenian shopkeepers sweep
away
each morning,
along with the art
of their looms:
the saffron
and hyacinth yarns spun for the
owl,
chariot and
wingéd horses
on Athena’s
raiment, the story-cloths
on which the Fates dance and
lament,
and teach
child-bearers
to weave defiance in a double
purple web,
their textile and text
incomprehensible to men.
Soldiers cannot
divide the seamless robe
passed from
mother to daughter,
mystery in a single thread.
--by Aliki Barnstone, forthcoming in New Letters
and in her book, Dwelling, forthcoming with the Sheep Meadow Press, 2016
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Athena holding a helmet and a spear, with an owl.
Attic red-figure lekythos.
between circa 490 and circa 480 BCE.
Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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