swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

navigating a baffling world
Beate Sigriddaughter

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Solitude

Here she does not feel the knife of judgment at her throat.

Here she hears the rhythm of the rain, the wind, juniper branches caressing her roof, and she
breathes in the scent of sun from the bark of ponderosa pine or cedar or even just sunlit dust with lizards.

Here nobody probes her heart with needles of contempt or good advice.

Here she does not feel guilty when her breath expands, contracts. Here she does not feel guilty though her race may have cheated, raped, and killed, and strangers feel compelled to discuss this even at a dance when the band is taking a break.

Ceremony

She stands in the river with cottonwood leafed out for summer and a friend’s silver flute playing
with the water and the wind. She, too, wants to honor the world with beauty and at the moment it
doesn’t seem all that difficult. The air is scented with respect and reverence. She adds her soft
soprano voice to help summer admire itself with sunlight dancing on waves and cool water
gliding over her feet.

The Truth

The truth is, she is not lost, and she knows she is not lost. She cannot persuade reality to be
something else, no matter how hard she tries. Without her, the world would be just fine. She
knows it and the world knows it. None of her provocative innocence can change that. Privately
she is quite the barbarian. She’d just as soon eat cold and straight from the fridge. No wonder no
prince came. Sometimes she counts her steps so as to stay solid in existence. She lives like a
mystery novel: Who has killed the joy? And in the background music wraps around her like a
cloak of yearning. Hope is a blossom. Hope is a claw. Stones can last for millennia because they
have become enchanted with being exactly what they are. No dreams of changing overnight, just
moments in silent periphery. No temptation to deplore that it can be dull in paradise. In the
comfort of the familiar, she takes what she can get. She remembers a woman who read romances
out in the open on the sofa while also watching TV, covered by a soft blanket, and eventually
falling asleep, night after night, to the most romantic outcome possible. It seems like a perfect
method for navigating a baffling world.

The Hermit

Finding justifications is easy. She has already lived most of her life like an excuse. She wants to
avoid the center of the cyclone of hatred. In her troubled shelter, she shivers just a little from
neglect, but she has blankets and otherwise no cause for complaint. Always an unrequited mind,
she knows that fear is older than love, though love is surely the future. In the morning she wakes
up to the words Take violence by the hand and tame her. Sounds like a good assignment, though
she doesn’t know how to begin. So many wild roses around her shelter, and not one of them has
the answer. She feels forlorn in the Rumpelstiltskin corner of her beautiful world. So much straw.
So much gold. She knows sadness will not be over until the end of war. Who will stop it, though?
The other guy? It is hard to be human under the circumstances. She is grateful for a day without
poison. Partly she moves deep into solitude because she is always so sad and doesn’t want to
burden everyone with her sadness. She longs for exuberance without pretense, like a minuet of
sincerity.

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Beate Sigriddaughter grew up in Nürnberg, Germany. Her playgrounds were a nearby castle and World War II bomb ruins. She lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her occasionally prize-winning work is widely published in literary magazines. In her blog “Writing in a Woman’s Voice”, she publishes other women’s voices. Her poem “The Hermit” received honorable mention from the DiBiase Poetry contest.