Last week, on Sunday, the Church of the Rez Artists’ Community Group met at my house. I deeply enjoy all of my friends and their amazing gifts (and you can, too, if you click on their names below and visit their websites):
Sandy, singer and photographer and leader of this motley crew
Janice, illustrator and fine art painter
Lois, visual artist
Margaret, gardener and author of children’s books
Laura, playwright, seamstress, and visual artist
Charity, a ballet dancer who does beautiful figure drawings
Steve, song-writer and pianist and writer
Josiah, creative writer and visual artist
and Bob, water-colorist; Lillian, dramatic actress; Christine, singer and monotype visual artist … and Jane (that’s me), poet, childbirth doula, and medievalist ( ~ yes, I know it’s a strange combination, but it is all creative, and it is all art!)
… among others! Anyhow, last Sunday, Mother’s Day, these wonderful people brought their current projects to share with each other. I loved it! Margaret’s mother came and brought an oil painting that was so very beautiful it pierced my heart — the way the light shown on the painted leaves over a woman sitting on a bench beside a dirt path … and Josiah read the poetic opening of a play he is writing for a friend who plans to stage it using puppets. Puppets implies children, and so you might assume a simple intro to this play … but it is more Shakespearean than simple. To me, it is beautiful.
“The Little Mermaid”
I was born adrift in the sea, silver tailed,
A serenade sung in the depths.
The youngest of six, I waited for the first blush
Of my fifteenth year to rise to the world above.
My oldest sister left and returned within a month.
Every night, she said, she laid on the shore listening to the sounds of the city,
The peal of church bells, the click and whir of carriage wheels.
Clear and clean in the thin night air.
My second sister returned in a fortnight
To tell us the sun was more than a violet bleed.
She’d risen to its setting, a rippling gold reflected
upon the break and swell of the waves,
and a flutter of birds etched black above.
After a week my third sister returned,
having swam the length of an inland river.
She described in great detail the smell of crushed grass,
the scent of jasmine and spice as women and men
Dined by the water. And the buckle and swell
of children’s voices as they played, naked,
and scattered when she came near.
My fourth sister came home within a day,
Chilled and shivering from the cold.
The world was a glassy shallow, she said,
White as pearl with winter snow,
While icebergs towered like churches
Adrift in the current’s flow.
My fifth sister left for just an hour
To return with the image of what she’d seen
Written blank on her face.
Miles and miles of flat horizon,
A bleak succession of foam and blue
The only feature of which, she said,
Was the lonely sport of wandering ships
Scoring the coursing waves.
Finally my fifteenth came and I swam up to the surface,
A smile fixed upon my face, and I saw for the first time
The shimmering roof of my world solidified to a plaintive
Grade of cobalt, and above me the sun a yellowish
Tinge shrouded by a fringe of wayward cloud.
I swam on my back as the afternoon ebbed to evening
And met a masted ship of coiled rope and plywood,
And upon it many men singing a merry song,
While they danced under a hundred coloured lights
that bobbed to and fro in the currents of wind.
Josiah Duke Harrist
http://josiahduke.blogspot.com/2010/04/little-mermaid-script.html
April 2010
*Thank you, Josiah, for writing something so beautiful that lets us see the Little Mermaid and experience her amazing transition from under the waves to a place above them.
THE POETRY PLACE 
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