In the Woods of Language, She Collects Beautiful Sticks
like a snail with a shell of sticks
— she loads them on her back —
Like a camel with a hump of sticks
— on her back, on her back —
Like a horse with a knight of sticks and a stick for a sword
Where is she taking this load of sticks?
— on her hump, on her hump —
She has no house, where is she taking the house she doesn’t have?
— in the fire she is taking it in the fire —
In the fire she is making a poem entirely out of sticks on fire and it goes like this
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Copyright © 2024 by Valzhyna Mort. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 25, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this poem when I couldn’t write a different poem, and this inability to write made me feel homeless in language and in poetry. So, ‘In the Woods of Language, She Collects Beautiful Sticks’ is a bit of homemaking.”
—Valzhyna Mort
Valzhyna Mort
Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort is the author of Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), which was cotranslated into English by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and poet Franz Wright.