The Girl and the Hill {poetry for lent}

Lenten resolutions are supposed to be broken, right, reminding us of our inability to be good?

Yesterday I didn't slow down to read poetry.  I played outside most of the day, our first sixty degree day.  I taught a class, and I spoke on a panel with three wonderfully smart, compassionate people about the need for feminism in the modern world. It was a beautiful today, but overnight the rain came, and froze this morning, and snow began, and winds, and we're back in winter.

This poem is from my good friend Dan Bowman (you may remember the housewarming poem he wrote for us over the summer). Originally printed in The Adirondack Review, it's also in his lovely collection A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country. 


The Girl and the Hill
by Daniel Bowman, Jr.

This is the year
the bodiless balladmonger
will make her ascent
up the hill called Saraboche
on a trail
where there exists
no history of gymnastics,
no syrupy resistance
half-whispered
in a carpeted basement.

This is the year
she will move as she is,
lit by broken autumns
and painted by the drifts—
no Daughters of the American Revolution,
no converts, no lessons,
no wounded animals,
not even distant obsessions
crowned from her February.

an explanation of {poetry for lent}