Joan: “Yes, I learnt to spin and to sew; in sewing and spinning I fear no woman in Rouen.”
* * *
Trial of Condemnation
The Needle
Joan
France was then engaged, as now, in
a bitter civil war, a conflict
that had raged since long before I
became my parents’ daughter. Contest
after contest, slaughter after slaughter
because of one woman’s monstrous
treachery. Isabeau, our queen,
famed for her lechery, had signed
a treaty in the city of
Troyes. With no regard for custom
or law, she turned her back on her
own son. The English king, Henry,
would now be the one to ascend
the French throne, not Charles VII,
blood of her blood and bone of her
bone. Some of my countrymen were
slyly misled. When Isabeau
spoke, they nodded their heads and
meekly agreed. They now fight for
Henry, an English weed taking
up space where he never belonged.
But I was for Charles, wronged by
his mother. He was my king.
Charles! No other!
* * *
The English were hated by the
true French. We hated their language,
their manners, their stench when it
tainted our air the day they
invaded. Henry had even
taken the city of Paris,
while our gentle dauphin, shaken
and harassed, headed south of the
Loire, where he had strong support. In
the town of Chinon, he established
his court.
* * *
I wanted to fight! I wanted to
go! But I was made to sit and
sew while Henry overran our home,
a savage, deadly pestilence.
My energy, my passion, even
my intelligence were forced into
an ever-smaller and suffocating
space. I felt smothered and entombed
in the coffin of the commonplace.
* * *
I longed to join the men in the
din and heat of battle.
But even my father’s cattle
had more freedom. While my brothers
went to war, I sewed and burned with
rage. My dress was a red silence,
a hemmed and homespun cage.
EANNE was older than I. I knew her and remember her for the three or four years before her departure from home. She was a well brought up girl, and well behaved.
* * *
Dominique Jacob, childhood aquaintance
Trial of Nullification
Silence
I am blood
that’s never bled.
I am Saturn.
I am lead,
both mineral
and malice.
* * *
I am prayer
that’s never heard,
folded wings,
a captive bird,
the poison
in the chalice.
* * *
A hymn,
a dirge
that’s never sung,
a pregnant doe
that’s shot and hung,
contagion
in the palace.
* * *
The starving babe
that never cried,
the wish unheard,
the dream denied,
the heart that formed
a callus.
Joan
Now the village church appears, my
afternoon I went to pray. On
its stone and well-swept floor I knelt
and begged for clarity. And there,
I often met the gaunt, forgotten
poor. Victims of the plague and the
English war, they wandered, starving,
without roof or bed. Too soon they
would be living with the dead, a
sparse and rotting banquet for the
hungry worms and biting flies. I
gave them what I could, a coin, a
crust of bread. I forced myself to
look into their eyes and wondered
how a just and loving God could
allow these blameless lives to be
so sorrow-filled and flawed.
I’ll learn the answer to this question
soon. The sun is rising. And with it
noon.
Fire
I burn I burn I burn my darling
I burn I burn I burn
I yearn I yearn I yearn my darling
I yearn I yearn I yearn
Y father’s house joined the house of Jacques d’Arc so I knew her well. We often spun together, and together worked at the ordinary house-duties, whether by day or night. She was a good Christian, of good manners and well brought up. She loved the Church, and went there often, and gave alms.
* * *
Mengette
Trial of Nullification
Alms
I am a nomad.
I am called Alms.
I pass from hand to hand,
from palm to outstretched
palm. Like sand battered
on a storm-tossed strand,
I am unsettled and un-
planned. Unquiet
and uncalm.
* * *
What I seek
I cannot find: a place
to rest. My happiness ever
undermined. How cruel a
jest that I myself have been
oppressed by the shiftless
dispossessed, the chaff
of humankind.
* * *
But in her lov-
ing hand I was content.
I cannot understand. Was
it just an accident? What did
my restlessness invent? Some
say that she was Heaven
sent: here by God’s
command.
* * *
I travel still, but
I retain the peace I
found when in her charge.
My pain released, allayed,
unbound, the change she
wrought in me profound,
as if I had been blighted
ground, and she
was rain.
Joan
It is hard to see my childhood
replayed before me like a dream.
Now I see the Meuse, the village
stream where I so often led my
father’s team of oxen. How I
miss those cool and softly sloping
banks. And near it graze the gentle
brutes themselves, steam rising from their
backs and muscled flanks.
ID you not take the animals to the fields?”
Joan: “When I was bigger and had come to years of discretion, I did not look after them generally; but I helped take them to the meadows.”
* * *
Trial of Condemnation
The Cattle
What did she hear that we did not?
What was that faraway look in her eye?
The unthinking step, the mournful sigh,
this girl unstudied and untaught,
* * *
trapped as if she’d been caged and caught
like a fledgling lark that is longing to fly.
What did she hear that we did not?
What was that faraway look in her eye?
* * *
Was it love, with its tender, unknowable knot,
or madness chanting its lullaby
Was she enraptured? Or was she distraught?
What did she hear th
at we did not?
Joan
What was it that I saw and heard?
In the beginning was the word,
the word that I am bound to now
as much as to this rigid stake.
They counseled me to disavow,
to say that I was not awake.
But only I know what occurred.
In the beginning was the word.
* * *
I was thinning the young seedlings,
an ordinary morning, when
abruptly, without sound,
without a moment’s warning, the
world filled with a dazzling and
celestial light. I thought my time
on earth was done and struggled to
recite a final holy prayer.
My hands went to my eyes, which were
blinded by the glare when all the
world around me blazed and disappeared.
And then, as if he’d been there always,
holy, fierce, majestic, and revered,
Saint Michael, the Archangel, broke
through the sacred luminescence.
In his uncorrupted presence,
other angels, six of them or
seven, each one descended from
the brilliant heights of Heaven. It
was as if I had awakened
from a profound and binding trance.
All life, birds, brutes, even the ants
knelt and bowed their horned and sharp-jawed
heads, and the spiders hanging from
their fine and silver threads stopped their
endless industry to hear what
the blessèd angel said, the air
around him spiced with the cologne
of countless flowers. And I don’t
know if I stood there for some
minutes or for hours, when in a
voice that seemed to pierce the very
fabric of the air, he spoke to
me as I stood trembling, weeping
there. “Be good,” he said. “Be good.” I
was awash in fear but somehow
I understood that if I kept
this holy caution I would play
a leading role in a sacred
strategy, which at some future
time would be revealed to me, and
that everything about my life
had been anticipated and foreseen.
I was very young then, just thirteen.
HAT was the first voice that came to you?”
Joan: “It was Saint Michael: I saw him before my eyes; he was not alone, but quite surrounded by the Angels of Heaven.”
“Did you see Saint Michael and these angels bodily and in reality?”
Joan: “I saw them with my bodily eyes as well as I see you.”
* * *
Trial of Condemnation
Saint Michael
They say I’m a saint. But are there such things?
And an archangel, too, apparently.
In every painting, I’m there, with wings,
all frill and froth and feathery,
a halo set behind me,
like a shining china platter
on the long and sagging table of a grand marquis.
But in the end, what does it matter?
* * *
The harp and that halo, all those things
that call forth your pale notion of divinity—
the choir that so often and so loudly sings!—
the trappings of a profligate reality?
Or the set piece of an ostentatious fantasy?
Some propose the former; others claim the latter,
depending on their mood or their theology.
But in the end, what does it matter?
* * *
From the guileless peasant to the cunning king,
all have speculated on what I might be.
What hilarious suppositions! What fabulous imaginings!
And what a tragic lack of creativity.
“Saint” Peggy and “Saint” Cate agree;
it couldn’t make us sadder.
Odd, for such a comedy.
But in the end, what does it matter?
* * *
What did the girl hear? What did she see?
The product of a septic mind and its deceitful chatter?
Or did I actually appear? Is there actually a me?
* * *
My friends, what does it matter?
Joan
He often came to see me after
that. And never alone. Saint Margaret
and Saint Catherine sat on either
side. Each on a golden throne. The
saints were very kind to me and
spoke often of a prophecy,
which from ancient times foretold
that a woman, shameless, bold,
would be the country’s ruination
and that its only true salvation
lay with a virgin from Lorraine.
Their countenances made it plain
who these two were meant to be. The
first was heartless Isabeau, the
next, they said, was me. They said that
all had been decided. France would
no longer be divided; that
humble though my circumstance, I
would defend and rescue France. They
spoke to me in lilting voices, sweet as
the song of birds.
* * *
Some will hear these words and think me
ill, a victim of delusion.
Some will say the Devil’s fiendish
fancy is the source of my confusion
and will seek out explanations
that fit within the comfort of
their own imaginations. But I
have learned that life is more complex,
that the door between this world and
the next is sometimes left ajar,
and that each of us is more, far
more, than we are told we are.
HIS Voice that speaks to you, is it that of an Angel, or of a Saint, or from God direct?”
Joan: “It is the Voice of Saint Catherine and of Saint Margaret. Their faces are adorned with beautiful crowns, very rich and precious.”
* * *
Trial of Condemnation
The Crown
Joan
In those confounding early days
I was badly shaken. I had
been taken from one world into
another, as if I were no
more than a feather, tossed and blown
by a compelling wind. As I
churned the cream or thinned the seedlings
in the garden, I began to
feel as if I were on loan to
my parents or that my life in
Domrémy was only a dream
from which I would one day be roused.
I went about my daily obligations,
and waited for the holy visitations,
which began to come more frequently.
I marveled at the change that was
happening in me, for just the
way the darkened world is brightened
after it has stormed, my soul was
filled with divine light, my discontent
transformed.
* * *
But then my father said my time
had come to marry. There was no
question: I refused. This unsettled
and confused him. It was the first
time I had balked at his authority.
When he felt his tight, paternal
grip loosening on me, his manner
quickly changed from indifferent to
grim, but my allegiance now was
to myself, not to another
man, and especially not to him.
ID not your father have dreams about your departure?”
Joan: “When I w
as still with my father and mother, my mother told me many times that my father had spoken of having dreamed that I, Joan, his daughter, went away with men-at-arms. My father and mother took great care to keep me safe, and held me much in subjection. I obeyed them in everything, except in the case in Toul—the action for marriage. I have heard my mother say that my father told my brothers, ‘Truly, if I thought this thing would happen that I have dreamed about my daughter, I would wish you to drown her; and, if you would not do it, I would drown her myself.’”
* * *
Trial of Condemnation
Jacques D’Arc
I am a simple farmer, a plainspoken man,
hard-working and God-fearing, just as my father
before me. It was he who taught me to keep my eye
on the weather, my sheep, my wife and daughter.
And what he taught, I will teach my sons
and they will teach theirs, each season, each life,
* * *
each generation following the other. This is life
as it has been and will be until man-
kind is no more and the sun’s
rays quit the fields. As a father