It's Hard to be a Saint Poem by Magdalena Zurawski

I was sympathetic to language, but often
it shrugged me and kept other lovers.
I crawled through the commas of

Romanticism and rejected the rhythms,
though sometimes at night I could feel
a little sad. I could emerge now

into a new kind of style, but the market
is already flooded and my people
have lost faith in things meant to land

a clear yes or no. It's good to welcome
a stranger into the house. Introduce her
to everyone sitting at the table and wash

your hands before you serve her, lest
the residue of other meals affect your
affections. "If something is beautiful we do

not even experience pain as pain." (A man said
that.) "I think I owe all words to my friends."
(I said that.) "We speak to one another

in circles alone with ourselves." (He said
that, too.) That's why we go to war.
We've gotten too big to be friends with

everyone and so I like to feel the fellowship
of the person next to me shooting
out across a foreign plain. The streams

of light on the horizon are something
I share with him and this is also a feeling
of love. I spoke to his widow and touched

his dog. I told his daughter how his last breath
was Homeric and spoke of nothing but returning home.