Voices

by David Elliott

  Joan: “Yes, I learnt to spin and to sew; in sewing and spinning I fear no woman in Rouen.”

  * * *

  Trial of Condemnation

  The Needle

  Joan

  France was then engaged, as now, in

  a bitter civil war, a conflict

  that had raged since long before I

  became my parents’ daughter. Contest

  after contest, slaughter after slaughter

  because of one woman’s monstrous

  treachery. Isabeau, our queen,

  famed for her lechery, had signed

  a treaty in the city of

  Troyes. With no regard for custom

  or law, she turned her back on her

  own son. The English king, Henry,

  would now be the one to ascend

  the French throne, not Charles VII,

  blood of her blood and bone of her

  bone. Some of my countrymen were

  slyly misled. When Isabeau

  spoke, they nodded their heads and

  meekly agreed. They now fight for

  Henry, an English weed taking

  up space where he never belonged.

  But I was for Charles, wronged by

  his mother. He was my king.

  Charles! No other!

  * * *

  The English were hated by the

  true French. We hated their language,

  their manners, their stench when it

  tainted our air the day they

  invaded. Henry had even

  taken the city of Paris,

  while our gentle dauphin, shaken

  and harassed, headed south of the

  Loire, where he had strong support. In

  the town of Chinon, he established

  his court.

  * * *

  I wanted to fight! I wanted to

  go! But I was made to sit and

  sew while Henry overran our home,

  a savage, deadly pestilence.

  My energy, my passion, even

  my intelligence were forced into

  an ever-smaller and suffocating

  space. I felt smothered and entombed

  in the coffin of the commonplace.

  * * *

  I longed to join the men in the

  din and heat of battle.

  But even my father’s cattle

  had more freedom. While my brothers

  went to war, I sewed and burned with

  rage. My dress was a red silence,

  a hemmed and homespun cage.

  EANNE was older than I. I knew her and remember her for the three or four years before her departure from home. She was a well brought up girl, and well behaved.

  * * *

  Dominique Jacob, childhood aquaintance

  Trial of Nullification

  Silence

  I am blood

  that’s never bled.

  I am Saturn.

  I am lead,

  both mineral

  and malice.

  * * *

  I am prayer

  that’s never heard,

  folded wings,

  a captive bird,

  the poison

  in the chalice.

  * * *

  A hymn,

  a dirge

  that’s never sung,

  a pregnant doe

  that’s shot and hung,

  contagion

  in the palace.

  * * *

  The starving babe

  that never cried,

  the wish unheard,

  the dream denied,

  the heart that formed

  a callus.

  Joan

  Now the village church appears, my

  beloved Saint Remy, where every

  afternoon I went to pray. On

  its stone and well-swept floor I knelt

  and begged for clarity. And there,

  I often met the gaunt, forgotten

  poor. Victims of the plague and the

  English war, they wandered, starving,

  without roof or bed. Too soon they

  would be living with the dead, a

  sparse and rotting banquet for the

  hungry worms and biting flies. I

  gave them what I could, a coin, a

  crust of bread. I forced myself to

  look into their eyes and wondered

  how a just and loving God could

  allow these blameless lives to be

  so sorrow-filled and flawed.

  I’ll learn the answer to this question

  soon. The sun is rising. And with it

  noon.

  Fire

  I burn I burn I burn my darling

  I burn I burn I burn

  I yearn I yearn I yearn my darling

  I yearn I yearn I yearn

  Y father’s house joined the house of Jacques d’Arc so I knew her well. We often spun together, and together worked at the ordinary house-duties, whether by day or night. She was a good Christian, of good manners and well brought up. She loved the Church, and went there often, and gave alms.

  * * *

  Mengette

  Trial of Nullification

  Alms

  I am a nomad.

  I am called Alms.

  I pass from hand to hand,

  from palm to outstretched

  palm. Like sand battered

  on a storm-tossed strand,

  I am unsettled and un-

  planned. Unquiet

  and uncalm.

  * * *

  What I seek

  I cannot find: a place

  to rest. My happiness ever

  undermined. How cruel a

  jest that I myself have been

  oppressed by the shiftless

  dispossessed, the chaff

  of humankind.

  * * *

  But in her lov-

  ing hand I was content.

  I cannot understand. Was

  it just an accident? What did

  my restlessness invent? Some

  say that she was Heaven

  sent: here by God’s

  command.

  * * *

  I travel still, but

  I retain the peace I

  found when in her charge.

  My pain released, allayed,

  unbound, the change she

  wrought in me profound,

  as if I had been blighted

  ground, and she

  was rain.

  Joan

  It is hard to see my childhood

  replayed before me like a dream.

  Now I see the Meuse, the village

  stream where I so often led my

  father’s team of oxen. How I

  miss those cool and softly sloping

  banks. And near it graze the gentle

  brutes themselves, steam rising from their

  backs and muscled flanks.

  ID you not take the animals to the fields?”

  Joan: “When I was bigger and had come to years of discretion, I did not look after them generally; but I helped take them to the meadows.”

  * * *

  Trial of Condemnation

  The Cattle

  What did she hear that we did not?

  What was that faraway look in her eye?

  The unthinking step, the mournful sigh,

  this girl unstudied and untaught,

  * * *

  trapped as if she’d been caged and caught

  like a fledgling lark that is longing to fly.

  What did she hear that we did not?

  What was that faraway look in her eye?

  * * *

  Was it love, with its tender, unknowable knot,

  or madness chanting its lullaby

  out in the meadow beneath the blue sky?

  Was she enraptured? Or was she distraught?

  What did she hear th
at we did not?

  Joan

  What was it that I saw and heard?

  In the beginning was the word,

  the word that I am bound to now

  as much as to this rigid stake.

  They counseled me to disavow,

  to say that I was not awake.

  But only I know what occurred.

  In the beginning was the word.

  * * *

  I was thinning the young seedlings,

  an ordinary morning, when

  abruptly, without sound,

  without a moment’s warning, the

  world filled with a dazzling and

  celestial light. I thought my time

  on earth was done and struggled to

  recite a final holy prayer.

  My hands went to my eyes, which were

  blinded by the glare when all the

  world around me blazed and disappeared.

  And then, as if he’d been there always,

  holy, fierce, majestic, and revered,

  Saint Michael, the Archangel, broke

  through the sacred luminescence.

  In his uncorrupted presence,

  other angels, six of them or

  seven, each one descended from

  the brilliant heights of Heaven. It

  was as if I had awakened

  from a profound and binding trance.

  All life, birds, brutes, even the ants

  knelt and bowed their horned and sharp-jawed

  heads, and the spiders hanging from

  their fine and silver threads stopped their

  endless industry to hear what

  the blessèd angel said, the air

  around him spiced with the cologne

  of countless flowers. And I don’t

  know if I stood there for some

  minutes or for hours, when in a

  voice that seemed to pierce the very

  fabric of the air, he spoke to

  me as I stood trembling, weeping

  there. “Be good,” he said. “Be good.” I

  was awash in fear but somehow

  I understood that if I kept

  this holy caution I would play

  a leading role in a sacred

  strategy, which at some future

  time would be revealed to me, and

  that everything about my life

  had been anticipated and foreseen.

  I was very young then, just thirteen.

  HAT was the first voice that came to you?”

  Joan: “It was Saint Michael: I saw him before my eyes; he was not alone, but quite surrounded by the Angels of Heaven.”

  “Did you see Saint Michael and these angels bodily and in reality?”

  Joan: “I saw them with my bodily eyes as well as I see you.”

  * * *

  Trial of Condemnation

  Saint Michael

  They say I’m a saint. But are there such things?

  And an archangel, too, apparently.

  In every painting, I’m there, with wings,

  all frill and froth and feathery,

  a halo set behind me,

  like a shining china platter

  on the long and sagging table of a grand marquis.

  But in the end, what does it matter?

  * * *

  The harp and that halo, all those things

  that call forth your pale notion of divinity—

  the choir that so often and so loudly sings!—

  the trappings of a profligate reality?

  Or the set piece of an ostentatious fantasy?

  Some propose the former; others claim the latter,

  depending on their mood or their theology.

  But in the end, what does it matter?

  * * *

  From the guileless peasant to the cunning king,

  all have speculated on what I might be.

  What hilarious suppositions! What fabulous imaginings!

  And what a tragic lack of creativity.

  “Saint” Peggy and “Saint” Cate agree;

  it couldn’t make us sadder.

  Odd, for such a comedy.

  But in the end, what does it matter?

  * * *

  What did the girl hear? What did she see?

  The product of a septic mind and its deceitful chatter?

  Or did I actually appear? Is there actually a me?

  * * *

  My friends, what does it matter?

  Joan

  He often came to see me after

  that. And never alone. Saint Margaret

  and Saint Catherine sat on either

  side. Each on a golden throne. The

  saints were very kind to me and

  spoke often of a prophecy,

  which from ancient times foretold

  that a woman, shameless, bold,

  would be the country’s ruination

  and that its only true salvation

  lay with a virgin from Lorraine.

  Their countenances made it plain

  who these two were meant to be. The

  first was heartless Isabeau, the

  next, they said, was me. They said that

  all had been decided. France would

  no longer be divided; that

  humble though my circumstance, I

  would defend and rescue France. They

  spoke to me in lilting voices, sweet as

  the song of birds.

  * * *

  Some will hear these words and think me

  ill, a victim of delusion.

  Some will say the Devil’s fiendish

  fancy is the source of my confusion

  and will seek out explanations

  that fit within the comfort of

  their own imaginations. But I

  have learned that life is more complex,

  that the door between this world and

  the next is sometimes left ajar,

  and that each of us is more, far

  more, than we are told we are.

  HIS Voice that speaks to you, is it that of an Angel, or of a Saint, or from God direct?”

  Joan: “It is the Voice of Saint Catherine and of Saint Margaret. Their faces are adorned with beautiful crowns, very rich and precious.”

  * * *

  Trial of Condemnation

  The Crown

  Joan

  In those confounding early days

  I was badly shaken. I had

  been taken from one world into

  another, as if I were no

  more than a feather, tossed and blown

  by a compelling wind. As I

  churned the cream or thinned the seedlings

  in the garden, I began to

  feel as if I were on loan to

  my parents or that my life in

  Domrémy was only a dream

  from which I would one day be roused.

  I went about my daily obligations,

  and waited for the holy visitations,

  which began to come more frequently.

  I marveled at the change that was

  happening in me, for just the

  way the darkened world is brightened

  after it has stormed, my soul was

  filled with divine light, my discontent

  transformed.

  * * *

  But then my father said my time

  had come to marry. There was no

  question: I refused. This unsettled

  and confused him. It was the first

  time I had balked at his authority.

  When he felt his tight, paternal

  grip loosening on me, his manner

  quickly changed from indifferent to

  grim, but my allegiance now was

  to myself, not to another

  man, and especially not to him.

  ID not your father have dreams about your departure?”

  Joan: “When I w
as still with my father and mother, my mother told me many times that my father had spoken of having dreamed that I, Joan, his daughter, went away with men-at-arms. My father and mother took great care to keep me safe, and held me much in subjection. I obeyed them in everything, except in the case in Toul—the action for marriage. I have heard my mother say that my father told my brothers, ‘Truly, if I thought this thing would happen that I have dreamed about my daughter, I would wish you to drown her; and, if you would not do it, I would drown her myself.’”

  * * *

  Trial of Condemnation

  Jacques D’Arc

  I am a simple farmer, a plainspoken man,

  hard-working and God-fearing, just as my father

  before me. It was he who taught me to keep my eye

  on the weather, my sheep, my wife and daughter.

  And what he taught, I will teach my sons

  and they will teach theirs, each season, each life,

  * * *

  each generation following the other. This is life

  as it has been and will be until man-

  kind is no more and the sun’s

  rays quit the fields. As a father