Historical Setting, 629 C.E. Vosges Mts.
In a moment for rest from all the dancing, the new poet sings a wailing ballad, a love story it is, but we aren’t sure of what makes a poem a love story just now. There are so many ways each of us is touched with beauty – sometimes it is in the longing or the pain, or the losses, or the hopes. [footnote]
While Brandell is meeting with some of his old friends who are here tonight with the music, Gaia takes this time to follow the string of wool she has tied around the clearing that will lead her, unguided by any helper, to greet each of the guests sitting along the edge of the circle. She had a good plan. The first guests along the string are the women she traveled with in the caravan of recent Jewish travelers. She discovers, on this occasion anyway, it is the widows from both sides of the river, who have found their common lot among those they once feared. So here the invisible, unspoken heart of their new friendship is the gratitude for Gaia’s imagination for peacemaking. Finding them here together is Gaia’s joy, just now.
Gaia takes the string in hand and continues to the next guest. I don’t know him. He is a man sitting alone, dressed as an Avar soldier, but he also wears the long robe of a scholar over one shoulder like a cape. The rest of the Avar guard Brandell and Gaia traveled with didn’t come to this event. So, he stirs my curiosity. Gaia seems to know him. She sits right down on the bench next to him and catches his attention away from his mindless staring off toward the place nearby where Hannah stands by herself. Hannah seems intent on guarding Gaia’s guiding string right at this place where the secret gift of the house awaits her discovery of it.
After a moment chatting with the fellow, Gaia goes back to following the string, and as she moves nearer the little thatched house her groping after the yarn takes everyone’s attention. But she doesn’t discover the house just now. When she reaches out her hand it is Hannah she touches.
“Hannah?”
“Oh Gaia, it’s all so wonderful!”
“Hannah, there is someone here I want you to meet. He was sitting right here, along the yarn I set …
“That man you were just talking too?”
“Yes, he was the Avar guard’s physician, Vizsla.”
(Continues tomorrow)
[footnote] Just to share the moment, as this blogger had just come to this place in writing, our local writing group Lakeshore Writer’s Group, was gathering and submitting works. This poem popped into my inbox with a ding. And it expanded whatever it was I was trying to say about ways of sharing our griefs and disabilities – Thanks Mike Hammer who is a Member of National Ataxia Foundation – National Ataxia Foundation
Lazarus Ink 