Burning with Joan of Arc
The yellow sand is hot under my palm
Despite my shorts and tee shirt
and slatherings of sunscreen
I can feel the sun
scorching my skin
Joan is stretched out beside me
sun hat over her face
bikinied body idolatrous
worshipping the sun
‘More sunscreen?’ I ask
‘I’ve already burned,’ she says
‘I was burning with the words
given by God
I burned for my people
burned in battle
I was burned when betrayed by my king
burned with shame when they made me a witch
and you know of course
about the English flames’
‘So yes,’ she says
‘I’d love some more sunscreen’
(c) Helen Rickerby
Published in My Iron Spine (Headworx) 2008
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About Helen Rickerby:
Helen Rickerby is the author of two collections of poetry: Abstract Internal Furniture (2001) and My Iron Spine (2008), and recently had a sequence of poems, Heading North, published in a hand-bound edition by Kilmog Press. She is co-managing editor of JAAM literary magazine and runs Seraph Press, a boutique poetry publisher. She lives in Wellington, in a cliff-top tower, and works as a web editor.
To find out more about Helen and her wonderful poetry, you may visit her on her blog Winged Ink. To read her guest post on the recently released JAAM 28: Dance Dance Dance, which she co-edited, click here.
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About the Christmas Exchange:
Basically, the Christmas Exchange comprises the poets of the Tuesday Poem Blog pairing up and featuring one of the other’s poems on their site—all in celebration of the Christmas and New Year festivals! I was delighted to be paired with Helen Rickerby, whose poetry I admire immensely, and even more delighted when I read the poems Helen sent me. I liked both of them very much but I have to say that Burning with Joan of Arc really spun my poetic wheels.
Firstly, because it’s very powerful poetically—this is a poem that packs a lot of punch! (Fittingly, of course, for Joan of Arc.) The power is achieved through a number of devices: the use of dialogue and ‘voice’; the spare language juxtaposed with repetition, particularly around “burned” and “burning.” We all have our personal prejudices and preferences as poets, and one of mine is a wariness of repetition: I find it tires very easily as a device, and risks boring the reader and dragging a poem into the banal. But in this poem it works perfectly—so much so that it was only on the second reading that I even noticed that there was repetiton. (At first reading I just went: wow.”)
I really don’t like breaking poems down—if they work as a whole then that’s good enough for the Lowe gal! And this poem definitely works as a whole. But because this is the Christmas Exchange I want to talk about a couple of other aspects that make Burning with Joan of Arc rock for me. For example, how quickly and effectively Helen creates the atmosphere of the poem through words such as “yellow”, “palm” and “scorching” in the first stanza; then the way in which she juxtaposes the macro story of Joan of Arc, her life and death, with the minutiae of the beach expereince: sunbathing and a conversation around sunscreen. The latter gives bathos to the former, but in such an understated way that as a reader you don’t see it coming—and even after it’s gone the effect is so neat that rather than flagellating over the glory and tragedy and injustice of Joan of Arc’s life, you are left simply with a feeling of satisfaction: for the poem well conceived and delivered, as well as for the “story” effectively told.
For those who might argue that it is not a NZ Christmas poem: of course it is! NZ Christmas is all about high summer, and beaches, and sunscreen, and Burning captures that perfectly. Given that Joan of Arc has been canonized as a saint, I also feel that it is timely to reflect that a festival that promises “peace on earth and good will to all” has many times delivered “not peace but a sword”—together with the stake, the rack, the wheel, and the cross. Not a reason to turn away from the promise that offers better hope, but an incentive, as individuals and societies, to strive harder to realise it in the world.
And on that note—enjoy Helen Rickerby’s Burning with Joan of Arc.
To enjoy more Tuesday Poems as part of the international Christmas exchange, go to the Tuesday Poem Blog hub here or click on the Quill icon in the sidebar.
