Samantha Berstler 

Song for St. Edmund

Where have you gone
I have suffered tied
To the birch tree for you
My hands ripened
Into two round plums

All the prayer beads lie
Like seeds across a grained floor
The threshing fields
Shrug away as weary capes
Their graves churn open

A wolf yawning beneath
A magnolia night sky
There is water in this grave
My cheeks are the blue
Of a northern sea

And I bend, scrape dirt
Black as spine’s breath
Push away the shadow of a goat
Hoary head thrust back
For the arms of his mother

Speech-bearer, I cannot find you
I have forgotten what is
Beautiful about antlers
Your hands the color of forgotten reeds
The cup of vinegar and myrrh




The Wanderer

Mindful of troubles like an old prophet
He will not stop praying before high windows
Fallen in a field of rye-colored carpet
He has slept near opossums
Torn his clothes into carved nations
He has cried the ancient cry
Which runs bright in moths' blood
Where came he spread, hand, hand, foot, foot
Sneakers opening up with dark frayed moons
Where came he to the basement
Lips softed white with drugs
Body breathing open into a fallow field
Unlit with waves of white December candles
Stomach wet with tombstone bruises
He no longer wanders over the whales' way




Heorot

I want to hush closed like the reeds
Behind the floating sea-wood
Its hull sluttish with bags of silver

In the hall I lie between upturned benches
The mud-blue bottom of a fjord
His hair like sea serpents coiling my breasts

Is this what comes after
His gift-sword rusted with beer
Pinning my cowl so I cannot stand

While he spends the afternoon spinning
The furs from the monster’s torn arm
Into a truffle-colored thread

Attaching a finger bone to the end
And braiding my neck with it, a collar
A white oar into and out of skin

He will collect up my gannet grey eyes
My rune-carved cold nails
Store them in his bellies of treasure




Samantha Berstler is an English concentrator at Harvard College, where she has studied poetry with Lucie Brock-Broido and Helen Vendler.  Her work has previously appeared in elimae and the Kenyon Review, and she has been the recipient of a gold medal through the National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and a NJ Governor's Award in the Arts.  At Harvard, she is a co-editor for the Gamut and sits on the poetry board of the Advocate, the nation's oldest continuously-publishing literary magazine.




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