Translating Your Mother’s Letters

By Shana Youngdahl

Now returns the season
of crunching across the field
to catch sunrise and horses.

In the barn we’d brush the flank, blanket
the back, and sling up the saddle. It was a practice
of dust: the way it gathers in the mouth, seeps

into clothing, rises next to the foot, billows
beyond startled hoof. To learn the art of reign
you must guide the body of a beast with a twitch

of muscle and leather. And you, dear friend,
laughing as the horse reared, as the teacher shouted
”you don’t even know what you don’t know!”

True. We never spoke of how it was to grow up
without knowledge of the mother-tongue, how the mother
language clicked about you, a wheel with one flat side.

But it isn’t language that teaches us the mother.
It is the body; the hand that pulls hair into braid,
or opens the oven door to reveal a death-snake.

When you told me of her passing, you were sitting
on a hay-bale in the Sangre de Criscos. As we finished
our water, you spoke of prayers for pain’s release,

for the body, the mother-body, to leave you. And now,
loss alight within you, flame-bright but cold
as the frosted Little Blue Stem under boot, like the anger

of the horse-eye, like the word you knew
but could not speak. The language I did
not translate, but roughly lent one word

to another. She came to me quietly, your mother,
to speak of your childhood in the Ugandan wild,
guerrilla soldiers, barricades, God. How suddenly

you learned to read the father-tongue. Slowly
I rendered sentences and some nights dreamt
you in a malarial haze, becoming beauty,

like all children do, from the fevered sweat-glow.
I wonder how she bent there, in the heat, pulling back
the netting to move near you, her child, her biographer,
her resounding echo. See, I’m not in the habit

of setting limits, it was a problem I faced
with the horses: “just take control!” our teacher yelled.
And once I calmed the mare, I caught your smile.

It is dawn. I’m remembering
the dry buffalo grass heavy with ice. How you turned
your back toward the light because the horses

had run close to the fence-edge, you raised
the rope to their necks, quickened your step. My boots
followed their loud echo rising in the dust.

Poet and novelist Shana Youngdahl wrote this poem after translating Kaarina Fordham’s letters. It was first published in The Stillwater Review.