Home
All I wanted after forty-eight hours in a North Dakota monastery—
fourteen hundred miles from home—
was more God. More strangely slow chanting
of three-thousand-year-old psalms;
more slow recitation of prayers—
a slight pause after each word
as if we were engaging in a call-and-response
with silence itself. What’s the hurry?
Brother Louie said, when we asked about the pace—
smiling as he answered, as if he knew
something we didn’t (which, of course, he did).
I confess, I’d been on something
of an acquisition mission just before our visit,
convinced that we, my wife and I, needed to acquire
a second home, a cabin in the woods
where we could summer because—more confession—
I’d always wanted to be able to use summer
as a verb. And didn’t we need a place
to take our cats? (Never mind that they hate
to travel; have been telling us for years
to stay put, be here now.) Such was the unquiet state
of my mind when I entered the monastery—
far from home, and wanting. Only to discover
how hard it was to leave that place:
the slowness of the pace, the depth of its silence—
some small part of which I carry now within—
or try to—returning as often as I can,
from here, wherever I am.
Lisa Dordal is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and is the author of Mosaic of the Dark, a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; Water Lessons, a Lambda Literary most-anticipated-book for 2022; and Next Time You Come Home, a Lambda Literary most-anticipated-book for 2023. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, Narrative, Image, Christian Century, Best New Poets, CALYX, and Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry.
Amethyst Review 