A poem by Manuela Moser
after Baudelaire
Their fat
nuns live in stone temples: they promise
to live
those slow virtuous lives, white as the snow
they survive
on what they find. What gifts the forest
gives, it
gives beneath the gaze of emerald shadows.
They
walk on worn-in tracks and to fill the hollow
sound of
the hollow woods, they murmur hymns and prayers,
and each
sound echoes into the frantic billow
of
perfumes, sounds, colours, resting in the air.
And here
the perfumes sing soft as the blushing pears
they
pick from the trees, green as the oboe
at dusk,
and clear and vast as a cloud-filled sky
corrupt
and illuminated by bright white flares
that
leave in their wake sweet amber smoky pillows
that
fill the fat nuns’ heads until their spirits fly.
More work by Manuela Moser
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