(Roots)

From the forthcoming book-length poem, This Broken Symmetry, on the life and witness of Simone Weil.

He is waiting at the door of "Miss Simone," curled thereAs though in utero—the boy she tutors, his new wordsCopied daily in a notebook, his future's hampered code.

She likes her room at the top of the cottage, stars at night,The branches full of birds, having been denied her wishTo be smuggled into France, air dropped, to die a sacrifice,

Not withering away in the Ministry Offices editing tracts,Composing her Need for Roots, DeGaulle thinking her mad,And in her notebook her last texts: "As in Christ's parable,

I am that fig tree, barren." Or any stone on which seed falls,Never to be fleshed. But to partake of the Communion,The sacrament an image, perfect, of the universe entire,

The meal that she denies herself, unlike those few eveningsHere in Notting Hill, before the nightly migraines wake her—Her landlady's warm offerings of coffee and buttered bread.

Not long now until the sanitarium in Ashford, her lungsWasting, she refusing food to ally her soul with the starvingAt home, the world uprooted, herself the frailest cutting

From the Hidden: "God is not in time. We are abandoned.But only from the past, absolutely beyond our reach, real,Only from the past alone will renewal come, if we love it."

Let it be Villanueva, ten years before, at seaside. She livesIn her bathing suit, not dressing for meals, her rags dropped,Her skin wet. And a fisherman threads a flower in her hair.