Susanna Lang

La Chapelle de Saint-Vérédème
            Sanilhac

I hear the music, a radio
or someone’s phone, as I walk
the gravel path to the river.
And then voices from above,
where I was going to climb
the stone steps to the chapel,
but find the way is blocked:
Chantier interdit au public.
Young men speaking Arabic
while they work. Agile
despite the tools on their backs,
they run down the path
at the end of their work day,
music still playing. In French now,
they tell me they’re restoring
the hermit’s chapel built on the site
of his cave, where he ate what
he could forage, slept on the stone
floor. It was the late 600’s.
The workmen are not from here,
may not know the stories
of the saint’s prayers bringing rain
to this dry land, the saint-less river
so low on this late summer day
it barely flows. They do not believe
in Christian saints, but they have faith
in stone, in work, in the restoration
of what was built to be beautiful,
and will be beautiful again.

Susanna Lang tries to be grounded in two places, Chicago and Uzès, France. The 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from December Magazine, her most recent chapbook, Like This, was released in 2023 (Unsolicited Books), along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). Her work appears in such publications as The Common, Asymptote, American Life in Poetry, Mayday, Rhino Reviews and The Slowdown.