Joy Olivia Yourcenar

Letter to Sophie

                        June 5, 1915
                        Neuville St. Vaast

Dearest Mamusin*,

War is a vortex cubed,
I could tell you
I was wrong about the future.
Hell is a relentless whore
in two dimensions:
Life here is measured
blood by piss by death.
I've discovered
an aptitude for war,
you needn't worry
that I'm bored.
German rifle butts are made
of a lovely walnut wood,
dark and supple.
It's not difficult to get.
Yesterday, as I was carving
the rounded belly
of a pregnant goddess,
the head of the man next to me
exploded and I noted
there is no symmetry
to the pattern of the brain splatter.
The trenches fill with the stench
of bombs bursting intestines.
Men shatter like stones
struck wrong here, Zosienka**,
and I find I long for
the cool silence of marble.

Tell Ezra I was wrong.
only in death are we
finally freed from form.

Henri

*Polish for Mama
**Polish nickname for Sophie, Gaudier-Brzeska's life partner

Joy Olivia Yourcenar writes: I am a poet, expatriate and freelance technical editor lucky enough to live and write in Halifax, Nova Scotia with my life partner, the photographer Eric Boutilier-Brown, and my daughter, Zoe-Genevieve, future empress of the known world. I have two personal websites: Mythologies (my own site) and icon/graphy (a collaborative visual poetry site with Eric). I have been published on-line in Gravity, The Astrophysicist Tango Partner Speaks, Avalon and The Initiative and off-line in The Maine Review, The Stolen Island Review, and Silhouettes in the Electric Sky. In August, 1999, Ryan Deschamps and I will be hosting Bareit's Private Tears, the 1999 Canadian picnic for rec.arts.poems. The best way to get to know me is through my poetry.