Norwich Triptych

2 Minutes Read Time

A crib in a really dark room — Photo by Alicia Petresc on Unsplash

I Showings

Years circled like ravens
in carrion rapture. Plague’s 
fleecing accomplice, snow 
fell to chill the children.
Steep iced hills. Sullen 
dayless dales.

Splintered bells
for burials ringing. All 
the endings I endured, 
and still I carried on.
A widow of winter’s toll, 
I’d been shown woe.

Beyond these walls: 
broken eggshells, factions 
sparring, endless
fenced-in fields. 
Cemeteries breathless.
Ice erasing small graves.

But then the iris in spring.
Then the hazelnut held
in the palm of God’s hand. 
Just a little thing to hold 
creation. A seed kept
in something hard to crack.
 

II	Metonymy

Julian is what we call
the church whose slanting 
eaves eased me inside.
No matter you
do not know my name.

I am the plainsong
the church still won’t sing, 
a problem of circulation.
Had I been crowned a father, 
I would have engendered the hymn
of your mother’s heartbeat
you heard before you were born. 

Remember that lullaby?

III	Anchor-hold

You cannot imagine 
living in the anchor-hold
encircled by walls hemming 
out silent, smothering sky?

Like when first marooned
in the round, the heart above 
sounding the dark. Mother 
immediate. Constant song.

I am here to hear what I saw 
in fever. I heard my mother, 
the beating. I have heard
my eyes looked like hers. 
I hear my whispering 
quill from grounded 
goose engraving vellum.

I prayed to make of myself a chamber. 
I willed the walls of me to widen.
A lass. I am an isolate 
plain lying fallow.

Ellie A. Rogers

has an MFA in creative writing from Western Washington University. She is currently a poetry editor at The Hopper, and she has served as assistant managing editor of Bellingham Review. You can find some of her recent work in Ecotone, Redivider, and So to Speak.

Return to top of page

Search