I saw a peasant woman sitting on a grave under the trees with a dish of wheat and milk on her lap, the sunlight dappling the white kerchief on her head. Another peasant woman came by. . . . I think they were total strangers. They greeted each other, and the woman with the dish held it out to the new-comer and gave her a spoon . . . .
To me it was an enchantment; for when St. Monica came to Milan over fifteen hundred years ago . . . . that protocol-loving saint, Ambrose, had forbidden the practice because it was too like picknicking for his type of mind.
— Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
I.
The tombs, which once lay beyond
The city limits, hardly visible from
The old walls on a clear day,
Had drawn closer down the years,
As those walls were razed
Rebuilt, then finally made
Obsolete by new walls
Twice as thick, thrice as tall,
Which were themselves surrounded in their turn
By unofficial dwellings,
A mobile city of tents and caravans,
The city outside the city
Which is the city.
II.
The children, who weren’t afraid,
Learned to treat the great gray mass of stones
As if it were a playground
By design. Their parents, meanwhile,
Had to learn to get along
With whatever spirits came
Flooding from the tombs on holy days
Like water from a burst pipe,
Much as other people, in other places,
Learned to live with hurricanes,
Earthquakes, volcanoes, myriad inconsistencies
In nature’s rule. Isn’t it amazing
What the human mind can teach itself to find
Quite unexceptional?
III.
Yet, even by the standards of her time,
Monica was widely seen to be
Unusually permissive toward
The wishes of the dead.
She showered them with gifts:
Mouthless they may have been,
But still she brought them baskets laden
With dates, soft cheeses, honey-sweetened cakes.
She came on Sabbath days,
And others, if it pleased her,
Praying between mouthfuls in
An unintentional revival of
Foregoing practices
(Paganism, in other words).
She later learned the error of her ways,
Repented of her wrongs,
Bitterly regretted all,
Especially the time she brought
Her son — the saint — along.
IV.
The saint child was fat fingered, vain,
Golden haired, eloquent, squalling
With pleasure (the pain
Would come later).
By the time he grew wise
And famous, he would deem
Children parasites, their intrinsic
Propensity for violence restrained
Only by their diminutive size.
Yet he wasn’t small, not for his age —
He folded across Monica
Like a sack of flour on a
Miller’s shoulder, burdening her,
Beating on her clavicle
With his fists, clamoring for more,
More cakes, more cheese, more dates.
She would relent, of course,
Pretending not to notice as her son
Let the dead go hungry in their graves.
V.
The dead, who hadn’t asked for veneration
In the first place, nonetheless
Found something objectionable in
The saint child’s selfishness.
Perhaps they were feeling sensitive:
Bleak developments in world religion
Had taken heaven from them,
Left them with little prospect of
The paradise they were promised, the kind
With genitals, killing,
Warm baths, unconsecrated wine,
And had replaced it carelessly
With strategic vagueness, the
Insipid prospect of so-called Oneness
With a so-called God, which
Sounded to them like nothing less
Than yet more submission
Masquerading as divine largesse.
VI.
So, that night, the dead became
A wave snarling on the shore
Of the material world.
They would have been detected
By modern weather instruments
As a sudden and inexplicable
Uptick in the dew point,
Thickening the air with
The slickness of their selves.
VII.
They came upon the saint child in his crib,
Kicking at its wooden confines from within
The blitheness of a dream. In the old days,
They might have turned the infant
Into a grasshopper and set him skittering
Among a chorus of frogs, or left him
Wrestling a snake so venomous
A single drop could clog the veins
Of a thousand full-grown men, their blood
Coagulating into cylinders of
Gelatinous red goo. Tempora mutantur.
On this occasion, their ressentiment
Was sated with psychological warfare,
The germ of an idea, a question
The saint would later feel compelled
To formulate a thousand ways,
The last of which would be:
“What is it that has sown
This war in me?”
