Selected poems
Why Caryatids?
Riga, 2018
Stephanie Green
Two pairs of shoes at end of day
sole-worn, street-soiled, sour-scented.
You put them out in the tiny hall.
I want to pat them,
as if they were small animals,
and promise we will let them in again.
Outside, the sky is thick with rain.
I lift my face to the sky.
You shake your head at me.
We retreat to our rented apartment.
In the morning, we go out beyond the avenue
weave through grizzled narrow streets
admire high-tapered doors and floral friezes
wrought black cats dancing on spires
round windows punctuating oval balconettes
marble caryatids bent in smooth-muscled servitude
calm faces betray tragic magnificence.
The crumbling flourishes of another age.
In the morning, we walk beside the river.
Its silver tentacles trail out to the distant world.
Why do empires require slaves
to hold up the heavy world?
It’s the nature of the beast
you say, refusing to shoulder my bag
and raising your camera in my direction.
I turn away, but I am caught
looking back at your face
cheeks red and wrinkled
above your chiaroscuro beard
sea-blue eyes clear as early morning
the skyscraper shape of you
tall and straight against a faded sky.
From Sahara Rain, 2026
Even your children will remember
Stephanie Green
After the flood that your children will remember
even if they did not see it with their own eyes —
the flood that carried the calf and hay bales away
even the great sheaf of corn cobs tied together
from the last yellow harvest
that grandmother carried home on her back
heavier than a sleeping child —
you see your loss
as almost beyond yourself,
a warning that nothing holds
not even to itself.
as the water rises and recedes.
Not the shape of the land
known to your family for a hundred generations.
Not the names of your children
called after their ancestors in the familiar way.
Not the ancestors’ knowledge —
how to tend the red burning soil
nursing the river water, even at its shallowest
nudging it into the right places to keep the plantations alive.
What would they have made of it
this deluded stranger
this wild grey being that cannot belong?
What would it be
to those who never knew peace or wealth
only the slow, harsh work of survival in a dry land?
What would it be to breathe air filled with rain
their cheeks wet, the long thirst cast aside
confronting a new kind of destruction?
In the aftermath, not even the mountains seem certain
as if the floodwater
gouging gullies and riverbanks
sweeping away what had been tended and built
could also wipe out the past
leaving behind gifts you didn’t want.
The tattered refuse of distant commerce.
Dead creatures swelling with foul water.
The rotten posts of a broken bridge.
The fear that nothing can stay the same.
And when the water receded leaving the rot
that would take years to clear away
did you see a threat or a promise?
A gathering of the world’s despair
or something more?
From Sahara Rain, 2026
A war can be balletic
Stephanie Green
A body can mark out
the line of a curve
cutting away the stillness
of everything else around it
delicate in the precision of its arc
anticipating the hard place
where it must land
a parabolic gesture
neither catenary nor gateway
as it rises and falls through space.
You might think of a tennis ball
struck with a latticed racquet
or a dancer leaping across a stage
in a culminating grand jeté
but today I think of cannons
unleashing a concentrated mass
on targeted homes and hospitals
or soft bodies lifted into air
by a force beyond themselves
never again to land
whole upon the earth
never again fully able
to complete the curve.
From Sahara Rain, 2026