Elisavietta ritchie biography of martin luther

September ' I am showcasing some selections of my translations online. Fog swishes through pines, screens our world inside a Japanese dawn. Fawns file through flowering quince. Through the scrim of mists we see the Buddha at Kamakura, Sika deer we fed at Nara. When mists melt, we will see Fujiyama surrounded by sapphire waves and crowned with perpetual snows—.

The tardy sun burns this day clear over our own gray-green cove, tide covering marshes and sand. The great blue heron proclaims longevity as he overflies cattails and huge pink marshmallow flowers edging our shore. December Ludmilla writes: Maria is in hospital. My plane from Washington lands a day too late. By three metros and a bus Ludmilla takes me miles across the city heaped with dirty snow.

Not neighborhoods. We skirt the hospital on snowy paths toward the morgue. A white-smocked worker chases out a dappled cat who slips back in, resumes his watch beside the slab. She wears her blue professor dress, beret she swore she would wear to the grave Through falling snow we escort her to the marble crematorium. Friends flock. Something like a service.

Then the fire—the Church forbids it but she's seen too many dead awaiting spring. Attendants, thrifty, keep her clothes. The coffin slides through low brass doors. We troop to her old flat, repaired, and toast her soul's lone journey through the snowy skies. The rest will go beneath a churchyard stone. Washington, In this wind swirling white I seek her still, and still the night is blind.

My attempts to fix her life in words freeze, then melt with flakes of snow. Yet, as if these were the drifts that cloak the stone above her distant sack of ash, I keep on shoveling. Strangely, suddenly, beating like surf that splashes now over bulwark and dock, shock troops of hurricanes farther south but on course to crash here. My heart was always docile, ignored as it pumped full, ebbed on schedule, pulse normal, blood salty as sea, relied on, like seasons and tides.

And all the recurrent seasons of love which jumpstart body and brain— What's happening now? I don't know.

Elisavietta ritchie biography of martin luther

Such pounding, invisible crimson surf. Take care! This casket of flesh and bones could shower your green world red. To get a crack at immortality: leave better work. Stop hanging out the wash…Yet life eclipses literature. On the line, a spider spins her web between the lover's shirt and a black lace slip: an untold tale. The three-year-old, pumpkin-haired, sprints at billowing sheets: this Don Quixote writes his own book.

A puzzled hummingbird probes crimson blossoms on the waving blouse— Merely blood from punctured skin. Red ink of malignancy? Best tend to the garden where summer's last tomatoes hang. Quickly plant before first frost winter spinach, lettuce, chard… Who will be here to harvest? Hang the world, over-rife with growth and love and fear and death.

While waiting for the wash to dry, the phone to ring, write. A real big mother of a snapper impervious to poison ivy, briars, lumbers up the river bank. Shell slate black, crenellated at the stern, snake neck, scaly limbs, hook claws, horny beak to sever fingers or a foot. A dozen rabbits race about, skitter, bound, zigzag, scatter among tiger lily clumps.

Still, I bet on her. She heads straight. She pauses on the grass. Was there a house across her path before? I offer her my pear core, sprint aside. She studies me: with loathing, mere disdain, slow-stirred memory of a duel beneath primordial cycads, or am I the perfect meal? She's hellbent not on making war or lunch but to unload her oblong leather eggs in some cache underground.

Now where…. I edge behind, lift her gingerly— not only dangerous, she stinks— carry her to an abandoned flower bed. She takes off, a millstone on the march, around the yard's perimeter at such a pace, distracted by the rabbits, I lose track. She grunts through the herb bed, crushes dill, churns the earth between oregano and rosemary.

When I check again, she's covered up whatever spot she finally chose, slid down the bank and disappeared. How did that repellant hulk entice a mate so tolerant of her appearance, scent? Was he drawn by long affection or, with pure chelonian lust, snatched the first female to swim past. Love in the muck in the dark or light of the moon on waves.

Like roaches, snappers may outlive us. Unsure of their gestation span, I'll watch the spot, escort phalanxes of hatchlings to the shore, ward off ospreys, foxes, gulls…. But this very night, raccoons search among the herbs, leave shards like broken ping-pong balls. Around it she builds a wall too high for wingless insects to cross, they keep tumbling back in her moat.

She crowns the crest with a feather. The sun, hidden by fog curling over the shore, enfolding wavering figures in scrim, still pours onto our heads. Observing death waft in quietly. When we leave the beach all that's left are footprints, finger trails, traces of moat, rays of recalcitrant light. You'd say, they are real: the child digging clams in wet sand at low tide, the boat in the cove, two canvasbacks overhead.

The glint of a winch makes the boat seem substantial but the sun will climb into a cloud, the boat spiral in waves and sink. The child, who dreamed herself somewhere and someone else, also may vanish, perhaps in the tide. Who knows if she's sweet or mean, that wrinkled woman in shapeless black stirring soup for the child, if she was a general's widow, or mistress.

Or if the old man nodding over his bowl was the one or one of the ones, if he marched on to raze a village or home to tend his chickens and cows. Was this house in his family for generations or just occupied when its owners fled or died in the yard? The town was destroyed. What lies under fields beyond? The child spoons the soup. An elf found you under a elisavietta ritchie biography of martin luther bush.

They quiz him on sums and saints, complain the storm is prying the shutters off, then, mulling their own recollections without speaking, finish the soup. Is he foundling, or grandchild, of the clan or alien blood? War weaves shrouds of silence around corpses and quick alike. We back away from the window, refasten the shutter, disappear into the storm.

The fragrance of soup and blood clings to our clothes. Like St. Jerome, we need to keep pet lions dozing by our beds, their paws upon our coverlet while we're asleep. Affectionate despite the claws. They lull us with deep regal purrs and guard us with their locomotive growl. Lions were smaller in the time of saints or in the artist's eye that had not seen real lions in savannahs, stalking, quaintly feasting on fresh antelope, bloody, lean.

True, table manners aren't well-bred. Housebreaking them becomes a chore. But why stare at a long-dead human head? Justin Taylor is executive vice president for book publishing and publisher for books at Crossway. You can follow him on Twitter. Browse Articles Featured Essay. An essay by. Read Now. Kidd and Taylor. Melissa Kruger. Ray Ortlund.

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