Natalie Solmer
While exploring the Exodus narrative of Moses striking the rock, the RSA faculty have introduced me to numerous characters, themes and ideas that have sparked my poetic and visual work. One character that stood out to me right away was Miriam and her mythic ability to provide water for the Israelites. She reminded me of the archetype of the divine feminine and creative life force. I wrote a short poem in the voice of water, or divine feminine, and I used this theme as a center for a longer, five-part poem.
While closely reading Numbers 20, I noted certain lines that jumped out at me. I used these lines for titles in my five-part poem, which also touches on themes of migration, promised land, the sins of the father, pollution and treatment of women in society in relation to a society’s reverence for nature and water itself. I was particularly influenced by our discussion in the RSA of The Anthropocene and the efforts of environmentalists and indigenous peoples to classify bodies of water as persons in order to grant them rights and protections.
Keeping in mind all of the themes I mentioned, I set my long poem into my own origin story—that of my grandparents who emigrated from Eastern Europe and settled in South Bend, Indiana, in the valley of the St. Joseph River, on the North/South Continental Divide, which is where I grew up. Because I love visual art and visual poetry, I also adapted the text of my long poem into a large canvas that depicts my origin story and uses the map of the region I come from as a background. The artists Nasreen Khan and Alisa Mahjoub helped me to realize my vision.Lastly, I created a “poetry fortune” box, decorated with river goddesses, wherein you can dip your hand and pull out a ‘fortune,’ which consists of lines from my poem, “A City On The Edge of Your Border.”
Natalie Solmer, Nasreen Khan Clark, and Alisa Mahjoub | A City at the Edge of Your Border
A City On The Edge of Your Border
1. This Terrible Place
I wanted to be a cloud and forget my people.
I left home and the place of my father’s father’s misdeeds, but the wind turned me around,
blew me down from the Blue Mountains, back north to the place of the Great Lake hanging
over my body, until my body turned into lake, into river.
O Waters, the man didn’t speak, he struck
to get us out to get the water out, O waters of strife.
My father’s father’s father
he led us to this city as a promise but now he can’t see it.
Our progeny, this land, will my children’s children drink of it?
2. You Rebels
The river is a river of money; the water, we make
her body into god’s money.
Our god currency: sick white history: the trade, the steel, the people.
When we can gaze on the water we will pay. We will buy a view and chop, then dig. When we want
what we want for cheap, no matter the water ruined, we pay, they pay,
our descendants. Why did I even
give life? I am out of control
of everything. The wind kicks up.
3. Water Gushed Out
I stare into her brown face, O Mother of God, the icon I inherited from my maternal side, preserve the gift
of faith. Our Lady of Czestochowa, pray for us: for myself, my family, and my country.
Most of my grandparents are from Silesia, a place meaning wet land
but also a place of mountains, of coal. They left the mines, the farms, the after-war.
They left Silesia, in all of Europe known as terrible, its pollution.
They came to the new pollution place of my birth
a promise of factory money and water still to drink.
After war, women are known to sing a Song of the Sea
after the Sea of Reeds, enemies, their soldiers drowned.
O what a chorus still they say we’ve drained
half of all wetlands; O destruction melody, melody that rises, that gains energy as it goes.
4. And They Drank
Shushushushushshushshushshush
This river is my ancestor, artery, the genetic code.
I curve & curve Which river am I?
The Odra? The St. Joseph?
What the Potawatomi first named Senathëwen Zibé, Mystery River
how the water comes roaring south then beats north again—O mystery—and empties
into the blue heart of the MiddleWest. The answer to the mystery is a map
of our topography. My mother’s baby blue house at the edge
of the North/South continental divide—I always wondered at the metal highway sign
when driving over borders often for lakes, for liquor, for men.
5. Holy In The Sight Of
The summer river is green, a dark emerald swallowing light. My father and I paddled a turquoise canoe
over it, careful not to swallow the St. Joe water like everyone said, holy with bacteria.
In mid-life my father lived out by its swamps;
in the city, we’d bicycle to where he grew, to parking lots
where I’d later sing vodka drunk. When I can’t sleep, I study these
street maps lit up in my palm, telling myself to stay alive
calculating how many miles (2.7) from where my father’s father died in backyard cherry tree (his own hand
tied the knot) to the riverbank where the dancehall stood, inside which my genesis:
my mother and father dancing, meeting their family homes (1.2) miles apart
before the marriage, before the divorce. Someone said
A society treats nature the way it treats its women.
My grandmother was finally leaving my grandfather when he did it. My father still says he doesn’t understand my mother.
Someone said, Flood the land then with menstrual blood. Wait.
I keep pleading with my sons to listen not just to their father, but to their mother also.
There is something of the one whose name means bitterness
in all of us, the one who streamed water into the desert. When she died, all turned to dust, the same one
who turns our blood to children, who grows a city, who stretches out across this border, all borders,
in the sight of her holiness, hush and listen.
Water Talk
When she was lowered into the ground
I followed as always, but
the Miriam I knew
was dust
no longer walking among her people.
I, too, no longer wanted to walk, to shimmy
inside the people. Instead, I sank
and shrank, and when I let go
of the soil, it sighed a gritty sigh
of sand.
I flowed back in time
to the Sea of Reeds, found my river
far away from the people and their mountain
place of the misdeeds of their fathers
place of the rock. They never guessed I’d want
to become bitter ocean.
Here’s what it took
for me to get there—the vastness
of their forgetting.
I get so hot with anger
I become a cloud. And now I spin.
Where will the wind send me? Where
do people grieve?
When the stone is struck, will I return?
About Natalie
Natalie Solmer is founder and editor-in chief of The Indianapolis Review, and an Assistant Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College in Indianapolis. She grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and earned a degree in horticulture (with a minor in poetry) from Clemson University. Before her return to grad school and career in teaching, she worked as a grocery store florist for 13 years. Her poetry has been published in numerous publications such as: Colorado Review, North American Review, The Literary Review, and Pleiades. Her art and visual poetry have been published in places such as Yes, Poetry, Talking About Strawberries All The Time, and Babel Tower Notice Board. For more, visit nataliesolmer.com