McRevolutionaries, please share your poems

Joan’s Rib

Science Friday, National Public Radio: Scientists conduct DNA tests on what is believed to be the remains of Joan of Arc. DNA tests will show if the human bone is from a man or a woman, and carbon-14 testing should help date it. A study of pollens will determine if it originated in the 15^th Century and if, like Joan, it was burned in the spring.

A split bone wedged between two smooth stones

made international headlines as I wondered

why 600 years later they’d go looking for it.

Convicted of heresy, witchcraft, for wearing

the wrong clothes, burned alive, three times, at 19.

They looked past the curve of her hips,

the hint of breast beneath the armor,

La Pucelle, the maid,

with the saintly voices in her head.

In the name of the god she roared for,

on horse, sword drawn to the sky,

the politicians and scientific men thought nothing

of saviors and bones, or histories being made.

Stranger still that they found the fragment,

the mere chip of DNA, larger than a pebble,

a fish scale, a weathered piece of bark,

in the river Seine, near Paris, 69 miles

and six centuries from where her flesh burned.

And I imagined the man combing

the shoreline that day,

who thought to pick up the blackened bone,

slip it into his pocket, thumb smoothing

over the indentation where it once attached

to the spine,

the man, in which the thought occurred

to take it to the lab, where a connection

was found from a  piece of woven cloth—

the only genetic match for Joan of Arc’s rib—

saved in 1492, blood-burnt

and smoldering in the coals,

picked up from the ashes by a child

who locked it away in a small wooden box,                                                    

placed it carefully under her bed

and prayed.