Poetry / Katherine Indermaur
:: In the First Days of Pilgrimage ::
O make of me your holiest echo Shape me by my wandering may all I’ve kept close on this earth be shorn from me Like dust from mountains’ uplifted arms May I crawl ever closer to your name
:: At the Shrine of St. Thecla ::
For days I too sat by the blue window asking Nothing Lord only waiting to be struck a tongueless bell but you arrive gentle As newborn lambs’ shepherd you Kneel gentle as the lioness with her cubs Amid the closing in of bloodthirsty men Gentle as the tune the nightwatch soldier hums As the plum tongue his armor entombs
:: Absolution That Begins and Begins and Begins ::
There is nothing beautiful left in me When I reach the mountaintop No desire no forgiveness Every stone face star Up here bare as distance I pitch me out of reach
From the writer
:: Account ::
These poems come from a manuscript that takes up the true story of Egeria, a female Christian pilgrim who traveled from her home in western Europe to the biblical Holy Land in the 380s AD. Some of her original travel writing has survived to today. One of the earliest female mountaineers, Egeria is the first known woman to summit Mount Sinai and Mount Nebo. She was not, so far as historians understand, a wealthy woman, but the rights women held in the Roman Empire at that time enabled her to travel relatively freely, and occasionally with a military escort to ensure safety. (The very same Roman Empire that executed Jesus adopted Christianity as its official religion less than three centuries later. Egeria would have been born about twenty years after this change.) These spare poems explore Egeria’s pilgrimage. They are both filled with and emptied by the desert landscape in which Egeria finds herself, and which would have been incredibly foreign to her.
Katherine Indermaur is the author of I|I (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, and two chapbooks. She serves as an editor for Sugar House Review and is the winner of the Black Warrior Review 2019 Poetry Contest and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing has appeared in Ecotone, Electric Literature, Frontier Poetry, the Journal, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.