Joan of Arc (Leonard Cohen)

From today's Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1431 that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy in Rouen, France. She was an ordinary French peasant girl, living during the Hundred Years War between France and England. When she was still a teenager, she heard the voice of God telling her to join the battle and help defeat the English army. She performed a series of apparent miracles and persuaded the French army to let her command a group of soldiers. At the battle of Orleans, she led the French army, bearing a flag with Jesus' name written across it, and the English were defeated. She continued fighting battles until May 23, 1430, when she was captured by enemy soldiers. They turned her over to the church to be tried as a heretic, idolater, and sorcerer.

Her trial lasted for months. Every day she was brought into the interrogation room, where she was the only woman among judges, priests, soldiers, and guards. The judges hoped to trick her into saying something that would incriminate her as a witch, so they asked endless questions about all aspects of her life, in no particular order. They were especially interested in her childhood, and because the transcripts of the trial were recorded, we now know more about her early life than any other common person of her time.

She testified that she had learned from her mother how to pray and how to clean the house, and that she was an excellent sewer and spinner. She talked about the games she played as a child, the songs she sang and the way she and other children danced around a particular tree in their town. She pointed out that she preferred singing to dancing. She said that she'd always loved the sound of bells ringing in her town, and she was greatly upset whenever the bell wasn't rung on schedule. She said that many of the people in her village believed in fairies, and that her godmother claimed to have seen a fairy once, but she doubted it. She said that she first started hearing divine voices when she was 13, while working in her father's garden.

After months of questioning, she was told that if she didn't sign a confession, she would be put to death. She finally signed it, but a few days later she renounced the confession, and on this day in 1431, she was burned at the stake. She was 19 years old.

She was mostly forgotten for about 400 years, and then she was revived as a patriotic figure during the French revolution. In 1920, she was canonized as a saint by Pope Benedict XV. She is the only person ever burned at the stake for heresy who later became a saint.

SONG: Joan of Arc by Leonard Cohen

BOOK: Joan of Arc: In her own words, Willard Trask (translator)

POEM: Rouen: Place de la Pucelle by Maria White Lowell

Here blooms the legend fed with time and chance,

Fresh as the morning, though in centuries old;

The whitest lily in the shield of France,

With heart of virgin gold.

Along this square she moved, sweet Joan of Arc,

With face more pallid than a day-lit star,

Half seen, half doubted, while before her dark

Stretched the array of war.

Swift furled the battle-smoke of lying breath

From off her path, as if a wind had blown,

And showed no faithless king, but righteous death

On the low, wooden throne.

He would reward her; she who meekly wore

Alike her gilded mail and peasant gown,

Meekily recieved once earthly honor more, -

The formless, fiery crown.

A white dove trembled up the heated air,

And in the opening zenith found its goal;

Soft as a downward feather fell a prayer

For each repentant soul.

QUOTE: "The most tangible of all visible mysteries - fire." ~ Leigh Hunt

Some Fires (Cosy Sheridan)

SONG: Some Fires by Cosy Sheridan

BOOK: Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean

POEM: Burning the Fields by Linda Bierds
1.
In the windless late sunlight of August,
my father set fire to a globe of twine. At his back,
the harvested acres of bluegrass and timothy
rippled. I watched from a shallow hill
as the globe, chained to the flank of his pickup truck,
galloped and bucked down a yellow row, arced
at the fire trench, circled back,
arced again, the flames behind
sketching first a C, then closing to O—a word
or wreath, a flapping, slack-based heart,
gradually filling. To me at least. To the mare
beside me, my father dragged a gleaming fence,
some cinch-corral she might have known,
the way the walls moved rhythmically,
in and in. And to the crows, manic
on the thermals? A crescent of their planet,
gone to sudden sun. I watched one stutter
past the fence line, then settle
on a Hereford's tufted nape,
as if to peck some safer grain, as if
the red-cast back it rode
contained no transformations.
2.
A seepage, then, from the fire's edge: there
and there, the russet flood of rabbits.
Over the sounds of burning, their haunted calls
began, shrill and wavering, as if
their dormant voice strings
had tightened into threads of glass.
In an instant they were gone—the rabbits,
their voices—over the fire trench,
into the fallows. My father walked
near the burn line, waved up to me, and from
that wave, or the rippled film of heat,
I remembered our porch in an August wind,
how he stepped through the weathered doorway,
his hand outstretched with some
book-pressed flower, orchid or lily, withered
to a parchment brown. Here, he said, but
as he spoke it atomized before us—
pulp and stem, the pollened tongue,
dreadful in the dancing air.
3.
Scummed and boxcar thin,
six glass-walled houses stretched beside our fields.
Inside them, lilies, lilies—
a thousand shades of white, I think.
Eggshell, oyster, parchment, flax.
Far down the black-mulched beds, they seemed
ancestral to me, the fluted heads of
dowagers, their meaty, groping,
silent tongues. They seemed
to form perspective's chain:
cinder, bone, divinity . . .
4.
My father waved. The crows set down.
By evening, our fields took the texture
of freshened clay, a sleek
and water-bloated sheen, although no water
rested there—just heat and ash
united in a slick mirage. I crossed the fence line,
circled closer, the grasses all around me
collapsing into tufts of smoke. Then as I bent
I saw the shapes, rows and rows of tougher stems—
brittle, black, metallic wisps, like something grown
to echo grass. The soot was warm,
the sky held smoke in a jaundiced wing,
and as a breeze crossed slowly through,
stems glowed—then ebbed—
consecutively. And so revealed a kind of path,
and then a kind of journey.

QUOTE: "Love is the fire of life; it either consumes or purifies."