Poems by Merryn Rutledge
Lost in Translation
“Faithful mother tongue...”
——-Czeslaw Milosz, “My Faithful Mother Tongue”*
Sometimes his sons make melody with him, but often
his solo voice must suffice until the next time,
next week, when his parents back home call him.
Or his brother, also an émigré, who phones when he can
because the Thai sun is sinking as New York’s lifts.
He likes to hear his family say—anything—
les huîtres for dinner, fresh from the coast,
a plan for travel to la fête de musique à Lyon.
He writes film scripts in flawless Brooklyn argot,
can mimic a Texan, but when, in English, he renders
the fish mongers calling in La Place des Lices,
the murmurs of passersby along the canal—
to his ears, he is a sound track badly dubbed.
In French, om the vowels, incarnate consonants,
home the long Breton summer twilight its song.
To Fly
To fly, as I am now, aboard
a jet, and all the while
be out of time in infinitives
that float, suspended,
nowhere past or yet.
To streak, Boston to Boise,
travel back in time,
arrive two hours behind.
To envision what lies ahead—
the waiting arms of my beloved.
While sitting still, to play
in the circus of language,
turning nouns into verbs—
to tightrope,
to highwire.
Or costume verbs as nouns
that slide, chameleon-like,
through sentences where
to be
is to be camouflaged.
To be at once rooted
in the bedrock of syntax
and unbound.
To take hold
of an unreeling sentence string—
to choose to tether
to past, present, progressive,
or the future now
ballooning.
Winner of Orison Books’ 2023 Best Spiritual Literature poem prize, Merryn Rutledge is widely published. A collection, Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed, is from Kelsay Books. Merryn teaches poetry, reviews poetry books by women, and works for social justice. After teaching literature and creative writing at Phillips Exeter Academy, she ran a national leadership development consulting firm.
Back to Table of Contents for Translation and Transition