Poet’s Statement:
This collection in many ways chronicles the journey of a lifetime – the search for meaning and the discovery of the sacred in the raw stuff of everyday life. I am no longer able to separate the two. Heaven and earth are parts of a single cosmos and time has become an artificial construct. My Catholic childhood was suffused with mystical symbolism that continues to enrich my life, even when I don’t fully understand it. My ancestors, all of humanity, and all living things are not only connected, but interwoven into a single tapestry that has always existed and always will. And as usual, the prose is inadequate to the task of expressing any of this. Hence, the poems.
From the book:
MY FATHER’S HOUSE
Life teaches us
whether we learn it or not.
And so I went in search
of God. Thought I would find him in Nova Scotia
living among the Trappistines
who rose at dawn to sing
Laudate and listened at night
to their own blood beating.
It all goes back
to blood and the word.
What we can remember
of dark caves and falling
what we have forgotten
until the body reveals
itself as pure longing
for whatever is not this
cold morning rising
in a too small apartment
curtains of soot covering the windows
drinking coffee with my father
who at 6 a.m. has already stoked the furnace,
laid down a bed of coal
the way he laid down his life
so that some tenant on the top floor
could have heat.
The word “coal”
this above all has meaning,
how time compresses it
from plant to fuel to diamond
the way it works itself into the flesh
until there is no space left
for wonder, singing, or even grief.
Worked its way into my father’s flesh
the fine particles coating
the hairs of his nostrils
journeying their way into deeper passages
year after year, shovel by shovel
until they had filled
even microscopic openings.
The doctors said it was cancer
but anyone could see it was not that
could see his body
had taken on incomprehensible dimensions
as if life had burned him down
to what was essential,
flesh become word
all the filled spaces shining
rising up like the God I had looked for
like steam in the pipes
on a winter morning
leaving his children
to the unfinished work of this world.
Rosaire Karij grew up in New York City in a large extended family of Czech and Irish ancestry. She attended nursing school in Syracuse and has lived in Alaska, Montreal, and the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. She was in charge of health care services at Planned Parenthood for 25 years, a position that allowed her to “pray with her feet”, to put into practice deeply held beliefs about social justice, the inherent worth of every individual, and the preciousness of our children.
She began writing poetry seriously in her forties, as part of a midlife journey that continues to this day, and has included exploration of alternative healing practices, African dance, Tai Chi, Buddhism, and archetypal astrology. She lives in Ithaca sheltered by the trees of an adjacent nature trail, enjoying the solitude of retirement interspersed with occasional visits from her two sons, extended family, friends, and her beloved granddaughter.
Blood and The Word
is a 32-page hand-stitched chapbook - $10.
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