"OM as Punctuation" by Genevieve Lehr
This is a selection from our Winter 2022 Issue, guest edited by Raad Rahman. Click here to purchase the print edition or click here to purchase the digital version.
For Ramona (1953-2016)
OM
Even the Green Woman was made
of time. Smelled of spoil and rot,
bodies of microbes scurrying through
the leaf litter of her face. Her hair was
wild, too, like you, a wild woman
of the woods made from ash and bark,
under the eave of a hill during Samhain.
OM
It’s bloody cold in this monastery. The food
is lousy, served cold in scanty bowls. Cold
shower once a week, when the mendicant arrives
unthaws the pipes with your hairdryer. Snoring
and farting all night, my cell mate stinks up
the airless room, and wakes up smiling. I’m so tired
from lack of sleep I hallucinate during morning chants,
become belligerent in my mind’s eye toward all beings.
My knees can’t take all the sitting anymore. Hours
of zazen in the shrine room, thinking of you,
your absence empty space. This morning, heart
collapsing, deep in the dharma of you, the blood
vessels of my eyes ignited.
OM
We stumbled through childhood prayers, bungled
the morning pujas. When all you needed was one
OM from the Heart Sutra to open the door of winter,
one OM to welcome the white-haired snow queen
stepping forth to greet you. Now death is telling you
her secrets. How the door of winter is never closed,
how it swings back and forth on its old, polished hinge
to align with the icy sill. This morning snow blows
from the Canadian landscape into Minnesota, down
the hallways of anniversaries bright as rain, blows
through the sleeper’s mind, gathers into drifts of foam
that fly off in the raging surf, along a shore where
snow buntings are born, where the snow queen in her
white gown is a sister stepping over the icy sill, rattling
the hinge
Genevieve Lehr is a Canadian poet living in Port George, Nova Scotia. She is the author of Come And I Will Sing You: A Newfoundland Songbook from University of Toronto Press (2003), The Design of Wings (2004) from Running the Goat Press in St. John’s, Newfoundland, The Sorrowing House (2004), and Stomata (2017) from Brick Books in Kingston, Ontario. Her work has been published in literary journals, newspapers and anthologies in Canada and abroad.
