Afternoon in the Archives

MELISSA RIDLEY ELMES

In a sparsely populated reading room, late afternoon
poring over manuscripts, scrutinizing unfamiliar hands:

Gothic not uncial
Who can read this?

not you, not them maybe her, bent over paper
intense, withdrawn from the world
inaccessible in her quest for access to the past
hands absorbing these manuscript pages scribbling notes    
for regurgitation in class an article a book

on women in Old English poetry, reclaiming their strength and authority

[suffer not a woman to teach]

Alone is not lonely in the archives

pieces 
of
pages
scraps
of
stories

fragments
of
form

These ancient, endless tales, colloquies, homilies, sermons,
palimpsests. Old English, Anglo-Latin. Cross-reference: Vulgate
traces, I’m tracing the letters, seeking their shape

This could be an i     no, m              no, n


Latin when it was living


it’s dead to you to them maybe her too

I see dead things
that aren’t dead
Look! Just here—

Judith slays Holofernes
in Latin



... Tea?

---

MELISSA RIDLEY ELMES is a Virginia native currently living in Missouri in an apartment that delightfully approximates a hobbit hole. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Black Fox, Poetry South, Belmont Story Review, Star*Line, Hexagon, Dreams and Nightmares, Haven, and various other print and web venues. She has received multiple Pushcart Prize, Rhysling, and Dwarf Star nominations for her work, and both her first poetry collection, Arthurian Things (Dark Myth Publications, 2020), and second collection, Dreamscapes and Dark Corners (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), were nominated for the Elgin Award for best book of speculative poetry.