Listen to Susanna Lang read her poem “If I could pray anywhere,” published in Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/2025).
About this Poem: I spend part of each year in southern France, which has recently experienced severe multi-year droughts. In the spring of 2024, I was still recovering from a serious illness as we returned to France, where healing rains had brought water back into the rivers and springs, including in the small village of Collias near Uzès, where we live. The walk up to the ancient hermitage is particularly beautiful, and never more so than that spring. It was the first time we’d seen water falling down the rock face and nourishing a stream that had been a dry rocky bed. The chapel to Our Lady of Laval was built in the 12th century on the site of earlier temples to Jupiter, Aramon and Kolias, goddess of springs; there has been human habitation there for thousands of years. People still bring flowers to lay on the altar, and photos of those they’ve lost or fear losing. Though I have never been a person of faith, even I can feel the presence of older, deeper forces in this place, as I’d felt the loving support of whose who prayed for me through my illness though I cannot pray for myself.
Susanna Lang divides her time between Chicago and Uzès, France. She was the 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from December Magazine, and her most recent chapbook, Like This, was released in 2023 (Unsolicited Books), along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). A new collection of Souad Labbize’s poems, Unfasten the Silk of Your Silence, is now available from Éditions des Lisières, and her translation of My Forests by Hélène Dorion is forthcoming from Book*Hug Press. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, This Spangled Dark, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. Her poems, translations and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Common, Asymptote, Tupelo Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, RHINO Reviews, Mayday and The Slowdown. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, and she is now working with Hélène Dorion and Christine Guinard on new translations. More information available at www.susannalang.com.