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  • Axum
  • Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (bio)

I imagine the dead cities beneath the teff.

When fields give up their stones, the gift is mine: stand one upright, construct a shed to protect ancient carved words from rain and I will fly 8000 miles to gawk

at what I can’t read. Children gather, offer up some coins the fields tender.

What do I know about a life of plowing? The donkeys keep their eyes down as I pass. [End Page 868]


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Bet Giorgis, The Church of St. George in northern Ethiopia. This rock-hewn church, one of eleven such church structures in Lalibela, dates back to the thirteenth century.

Mike Gadd © 2010

[End Page 869]


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Bet Giorgis, The Church of St. George in Lalibela, northern Ethiopia. Photographed from the angle of the church’s cross-shaped stone roof.

Mike Gadd © 2010

[End Page 870]


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A “hawilt/hawilti,” “stele” (plural, stelae) or obelisk in Axum. Carved and erected perhaps as early as the third or fourth century A.D., these stelae served as markers of burial sites, especially for monarchs and their families.

Emily Raboteau © 2010

[End Page 871]

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a National Book Award finalist, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She teaches in the English Department at Cornell University.

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