Ollie Burgess

Ollie Burgess is a piano teacher who lives in a small town west of Atlanta. She reads classic literature, cooks, talks theology, and gazes at the stars when a pen is not in her hand. She posts poems on her Substack, olivet (olivetpoetry.substack.com). 

when saints die

(a train of thought while staring at an ikon of St. George,

who coldly stabs the metallic skin of the sea beast.)

sometimes the night is not the absence

of light but a Thing like an unsheathed sword.

I sit, in the beam of a full and yellow moon,

facing the irritating luster of gold-veneered ikons.

this, this is when the saints would whisper prayers

and wait for you to pierce them with a spear.

yes, my words should gain their bravery and tiptoe

out of the cavern of my lips, but silence is safer.

it avoids conjuring up the beastly things

you let wallow beyond the vault of the clouds,

avoids incantations that would pick apart

the rungs of my DNA with deft fingers.

if I ventured beyond the mouth of the cave,

you would capture me, make me a prisoner

of war, like all those saints who stared down a lion’s

throat. all these saints sit illuminated, gilded,

hypothetically harmless on my wall. how many

of them left this world without tattered and bloody clothes?

is your fingerprint not dipped in their blood?

you caught them in the beam of jaundiced light

and whispered ethereal things into their bony minds.

when Leviathan got sleepy eyes, they ambled

close until his nostril-breath lifted their hair.

the beast was quick and clawed them apart

the instant they lifted their sword. where are they

now? in heaven, as the bishops predicted,

or in hell, where the pagans banished

them so they could have some peace?

all cultures after all believe incompatible things.

you could be the world’s greatest cheat, God,

for even saints’ minds lie. maybe when saints die

they have the feeling I’m having right now:

that all your miracles are placebo pills we swallow

just to make us feel like we’re not unraveling.

blood drips from your spear. perhaps it really is

as the tales say, and it’s real dragon’s blood.

but step on my side of the window pane and see

what I see: bloody swords in the hands of some saints,

and in the chests of others, and an ikon, in which you

are St. George, and I the dragon.

Read Ollie’s work and more in Solum Journal Volume VI: Doubt (forthcoming).