Poetry – Issue 8 | February 2010
Two poems by Susanna Rich
Nun Flying Through Walls
(After Míklos Melocco’s sculpture, Budapest)
Ancient corner convent door leads now to
a newsstand—Fuji disposables; paprika, like red horns,
dangling; holographic cards of Jesus over the Danube.
Even locals rarely know of the stone woman above the lintel,
who flies horizontal through the building’s outer corner—
soles, black shoes, furls of blue habit
are a stone kite on Judge Petermann Street;
belt to granite wimple—she bursts into Townhouse Road.
Wall angles to wall where a magician might slice
through a woman all plumes, décolletage, net tights.
Here, the pink stucco corner chevrons out from her belly.
Bus stop bench across from her, I sit with the lover
to whom my father shuttled on Delta—United
States to Hungary, future to past. My red tulips
wilt in her lap. We look at the nun. I ask how
one manages decades of longing for the Beloved.
She tells me the only freedom is to turn back,
like Lot’s wife, until you become the pain.
Here she looks at me. I make myself still.
“Only stone can pass through stone,” she says.
We look up, again. “Yes,” I say, “Let no one
know whether the hands at your lips
pray, hide secrets, or protect your joy.”
“Or,” she adds, “stop hunger with silence.”
About the author
Susanna Rich is a bilingual Hungarian-American, a Fulbright Fellow in Creative Writing to Hungary, a Collegium Budapest fellow and a Professor of English at Kean University, New Jersey. An Emmy Award nominee for her baseball poetry in Craig Linvahl’s documentary, Cobb Field: A Day at the Ballpark, Susanna is on tour with two poetry performances, Television Daddy and The Drive Home, both directed by Kennedy-Center-Award-winning Ernest Wiggins. Susanna is author of two poetry collections, Television Daddy and The Drive Home.
