Eileen Myles, photo by Shae Detar
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Joan
Today, May 30th, Joan
of Arc was burned.
She was 19 and
when she died
a man saw white doves
fy from her mouth.
Joan was born in 1412
between Lorraine
and Champagne. Joan
was raised on legends.
Merlin said France would be
lost by a woman and saved
by a virgin. Joan was
not an adventurous girl, not
a tomboy, but very dreamy,
good, stay-at-home,
the baby of the family.
Joan never got her period.
She heard these voices
in the bells, she saw angels
in colored glass. She believed
the sun moved around
the earth because that’s
what she saw. She believed
God wanted Charles VII
to be King of France
because that’s what Michael,
Catherine & Margaret told
her when she listened to
the bells. Her father
said he’d drown her
if she didn’t stop this
nonsense.
She was 19 years old
when they burned her body in the middle of town
while she was still alive. A white dove
came out of her mouth as she died.
Five hundred and forty-eight years ago today.
A dove leaped right out of her mouth.
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Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing), I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems, and Chelsea Girls. They showed their photographs in 2019 at Bridget Donahue, NYC. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, TX. [For more poems and information, see this link and this previous post.] "Joan" is from I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems. Copyright© 2015 by Eileen Myles. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
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Isidore Patrois: Jeanne d'Arc allant au supplice [Joan of Arc Led to the Stake], 1867, oil on canvas. Musée des beaux-arts, Rouen.