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Joan’s
Question
By
Martha Braniff
____________________
In the stone church
of
Lesser Towne,
Joan of Arc, Lorraine’s maid,
prostrate on the transept floor,
her womb, a sacred sepulcher
of slandered witches.
As French armies fall, she prays
in a chapel where walls rage
with men-crushing dragons,
dead children hanging
on knights’ silver shields,
a Savior dragging gilded cross,
flying horses,
and a spiked halo
on the Bishop.
Her mother, the organist,
and her father, the janitor,
try in vain to dissuade
Joan from listening
to the Angels who exhort her:
Beat the English.
March to Paris.
Send a hot epistle
to the Bishop of Beauvais,
insisting he
remain a loyal Frenchman.
A letter ignored at first,
then saved for her burning.
And at her trial,
the Bishop’s main concern--
Joan dresses as a man.
Her last words to him,
a saint's simple query:
How can a woman fight a war,
if she wears a dress?
___________________
A
message to Martha: We tried contacting Bill Gates just like you asked, but he
wasn’t very responsive to what we had to say about Defenestration
and the thesaurus and all of that. Which was kind of a bummer, because we
brought him muffins and cups of apple juice. They had chocolate chips in them,
too. The muffins, not the apple juice.
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