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A Literary Blog

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I am a writer based in New Jersey. I have a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a Master’s degree from the University of Toronto. I have experience as a German to English translator, a technical writer, and a grant writer. In my writing, I explore myth, legend, and languages. This blog is devoted to my past and future writings. – Johanna Rodda

  • The First Shall Be Last



    When one day I walked into a Fellowship,

    searching for some way or form or fashion

    in which to find god, in whatever manner that is possible,

    I was greeted with a flaming chalice, and a singing bowl.

    The structure of this church – if church it can be called –

    is in form and subject different from those I have known.

    I was born an atheist. For long, I thought

    not believing in god meant I believed in nothing.

    To try to have something I could adhere to,

    I went to services, chanted my Pater nosters,

    dug up my grandmother’s old rosary and prayed to Mary

    (calling her Stella maris and Alma mater and other kind names),

    and tried to find in ancient happenings, miracles.

    I looked then to Yahweh, in all his power

    to flood and to ignite, and to part the waters and render

    null the fires which he had been keen to create.

    I looked further, into the east, trying to still my mind

    enough so as to find peace in connection in and through everything.

    Wherever I searched, I wanted more. I looked to science

    to fill the gaps, to see all that is as merely a reaction

    on a purely physical level, and that’s the end of the equation.

    This satisfied me until I came to how we can never know

    beyond the borders and the boundaries of the universe we live in,

    for at the very beginning, all the rules we know founder.

    I suppose, for all they share, the two domains, of faith and of science,

    one instead complements the other, but the domains remain distinct.

    Then there is, too, the matter of meaning.

    If the universe is all there is, and if we cannot know

    beyond it, as science asserts, then what is there to validate

    the whole? Is this not where “god” comes in?

    Why can I not believe in all at once, this being called “god,”

    and, at the same time, this system called science?

    The Fellowship – from the moment I entered – greeted me.

    I sat, and listened, and stood when I was asked,

    sang, in my tinny little voice, hymns I had never heard before.

    In the chalice there burned a light, a little candle, to symbolize,

    maybe, what validates all life, connecting science and faith,

    faith and science: the little tendril that joins the two.

    During that hour, I was convinced: not too sanguine; I know

    this, like everything, will take some time and consideration,

    right now, which is above my station to fully consider.

    What it is the light represents, I do not know, not in full,

    and maybe never will, no matter how I might study.

    For, the light is the simplest, most profound truth,

    that runs through everything that is and has motion,

    that signals comfort in the dark and supports life.

    I may not know the name of it, or how to say it in words,

    but I feel and have felt it every day I am alive.

  • All The World’s A Cafe



    From coffee shop to far cafe,

    boulangerie to beer garden,

    in foreign cities with different ways

    than those which I have known,

    from bright of day to falling night,

    across the wide-set ocean,

    on the other side of a mountain,

    not knowing the language,

    being hard pressed to replicate

    the sounds on the menu,

    in a place that is strange,

    with friends to guide

    or with no friends,

    on busy main streets

    or down side ones,

    knowing what should be eaten

    and where,

    or else trying something

    that doesn’t look at all edible,

    but always visiting

    the place less tried,

    beloved of locals,

    from cafe to bodega

    to the fanciest restaurant in town,

    on the journey of all a lifetime,

    becoming, through a coffee

    or a sit-down meal

    or a bite standing

    a local of the place visited

    instead of a transient visitor,

    and finding (through food and drink)

    the very soul and essence

    of the places frequented,

    the shape and force of life

    that comes about, first of all,

    through what food is eaten,

    and where,

    and knowing that joining in

    the ritual of the taking in

    of food and drink,

    partaking of a meal

    in a new, foreign locale,

    you become part of that place,

    its soul and essence,

    part of its history,

    I have traveled the wide

    wide world, from a picnic

    on an alpine peak, thin of air,

    to the gentle spending of an afternoon

    in a cafe in Paris,

    to a place in the east

    whose food was strange to me,

    coming to understand the place

    a little better – just a little – and

    becoming, then, more than just a tourist,

    a clear and true denizen

    of the world, of the life

    lived in it, down to its

    most basic essence:

    the glorious, god-given sustenance,

    the gentle mark of

    food.

  • The Garden of the Most Beautiful



    I shall call her, Ave Formossisma!

    Behold the most beautiful one!

    For that is what she is: most beautiful.

    What other guise would you have

    the mother of all mankind be under?

    Of course, by this, I mean no other than Eve,

    fair Eve, Eve who once lived in the Garden.

    Why should I not think of her, I who owe

    what I am to her, whatever guise she might possess,

    whether woman shaped by aliens, the Anunnaki,

    bred from our simian ancestors to do toil for them,

    or Mitochondrial Eve, ancient mother in Africa,

    or Eve herself, cast out of Eden.

    I went to the garden once.

    I don’t know how I went or why.

    It was one night on the borders of sleep,

    but it was not sleep that took me there.

    The grass upon which I stepped was substantial.

    When I reached down it yielded to my fingers.

    I was in the garden of the most beautiful.

    A few times I blinked and stood to consider.

    My time in this place was limited, that I knew.

    I had to get right to the heart of it.

    To one side, there was a cataract, a tendril of water

    that cascaded down into a pool from on high.

    This, I saw, was a place of peace.

    I moved toward the center.

    There stood a tree. The Tree.

    I stepped toward it, reached out to pluck a ripe fruit.

    But instead, my fingers grazing the juicy thing,

    I saw her standing there, a little way away.

    She was beautiful, with brown skin and black hair.

    I was in love with her at once, so ancient and wise,

    my ever-eternal mother in the heart of the world.

    And, seeing her there, I had the sudden sense

    that everything in this world is rational,

    reasonable, that I am fully part of it,

    that I could (like her) start something

    that one day would reach all around the world.

    What else then, but that, blinking,

    uncovering this sudden revelation within my mind,

    I should find myself lying in bed once more,

    staring up at the ceiling.

    The same, but somehow different.

    I suggest to everyone to take a trip

    to the Garden of the Most Beautiful.

  • The Diamonds, or the Green Pendant



    One day, in the afternoon, two weeks after Christmas,

    as I am busy preparing to go out, when I have

    put on my favorite outfit and will go to a cafe

    for a few hours, writing, I am faced with a decision:

    to wear the diamond necklace, or the green pendant.

    The diamonds have much to recommend them.

    They play in series, tiny little sparkling slivers

    down a thin, twisting platform of rosy gold

    that merges with a strip of silver.

    The necklace is only half an inch high,

    delicate all along its length, and small.

    I bought it as a Christmas gift for myself.

    The green pendant is lovely in a different way.

    It is not so delicate, not so elegant,

    but more substantially smithed.

    The green enamel, rich with a design

    drawn from the Book of Kells

    is set in silver in a pattern like a teardrop.

    A gentle Irish tear!

    Because my father gave it to me for a Christmas

    that still lingers heavy in my mind, it is special

    to me in a way that the diamonds will never be.

    A long time I stand and stare at the two pendants,

    recumbent atop my dresser, in front of my mirror,

    next to the tubes and the compacts of makeup

    I have just slathered onto my face.

    Each necklace speaks to me in its own way.

    The choice before me: will I be elegant, delicate, keen,

    with the diamonds dripping from my neck,

    or will I wear the green pendant my father gave me?

    I stand long weighing the two options,

    deciding on how I want to present to the world,

    who exactly I am.

  • In The Realm Of Morpheus



    At night, when I lay down to sleep

    and dream, dreaming, I am in Shangri-la.

    A castle. Enchanted forest. Endless sea.

    Or maybe, my self, flying through ether,

    jetting around like nothing.

    I plumb silent seas, course out

    to the Venice of my dreams, an island.

    Wondrous, the realm I am in then.

    Or perhaps, in dreams, I am just the poetic artist.

    I capture life with my every stroke,

    the pen of my mind capturing life

    in all its ever-wondering complexity.

    Writing a verse. A story. An epic

    that curls and curvets through mythic dreams,

    reaching far, far from sea to sea,

    of such moving power as to move

    the very ground of Morpheus on which I stand.

    Or, maybe I am just in fact the epic,

    my story the great history of all the world –

    ranging far through and on and past mountains

    with peaks like birds’ beaks, reaching high,

    perhaps on foot, or maybe I fly again:

    the best epic dreams are those I spend

    with some other, sharing the glorying feeling

    of having scaled my own Everest.

    And wake up the next morning knowing it.

    In dreams, I am a castle-stalker.

    A tightrope-walker. I seize this life

    and what it offers, with never a thought

    that that is not of what my waking life really consists.

    Waking in the morning, I open my eyes –

    the hardest thing, sometimes, to ever do –

    and see tendrils of sunlight fighting their way

    into a once-dark room. Vestiges remain.

    But, the story I write in dreams, is just

    too little beyond what my mind can recall.

    I do not surrender, neither to the skepticism

    of conscious thought, nor to the sensuousness of sleep

    but live in between, in a world of waking wonder.

  • Through Air Most Idoneus



    At my desk I sit, and I stare –

    the wings of birds so idoneus,

    as they flit through the air,

    curling and curveting, light and thin,

    resting gently on a feeder

    outside the window of my room,

    no bigger than half my palm:

    I could hold them and feel no weight.

    Watching them, out is in.

    There is nothing between us,

    no glass, no space, no air;

    those wings, as they course

    from the feeder up, up in the sky,

    are my own wings, myself,

    lifting me high above the things

    that are my life, the daily routine,

    the in-and-out and constant motion.

    And I am with them. I fly away.

    As I am one of them,

    I both admire and am beauty:

    my lightness, fast my form,

    soaring, sweeping, seeking on high

    the glory feeling of being

    no larger than half a palm.

    I range from tree to tree

    and there alight, weightless as I am,

    looking out on vistas bare and bright,

    lissome and free, and living

    as I curl and curvet

    through fulsome air, lighter far

    than anything Man can conceive:

    I am – those little birds –

    flocking outside my window –

    flecks of beak and wing

    so glorious in the bounty of nature.

  • Cross Stitch



    There is a gentle kind of love

    in the ritual and the routine

    of drawing thread through fabric,

    in and out, lax and taut,

    like the ebb and flow of life,

    to forge an image so geometric-perfect,

    thread crossing over thread,

    each movement of the needle slight and slow.

    In I draw the thread. Out I pull it:

    red, blue, black and gold, against a background

    of cream white Aida cloth.

    There is a little prick on my finger

    from where the needle has stuck me

    as it made its way through the fabric.

    Slim, the needle, like a laser into heaven.

    Like the eye of God looking down on Earth,

    piercing through the cloth, laying tracks,

    that together form the picture of the whole.

    Holding the slender metal I am mistress of the cloth,

    owner of the little world webbed into the canvas.

    Hour upon hour, I stitch and stitch away,

    patiently, as the picture comes together.

    I am sewing an ark, with animals

    on many different tiers in many different colors.

    What a menagerie is here!

    Casting my mind out as I wonder,

    I can almost hear the barking and the braying

    and the mewling, the cawing – just almost.

    The figures lift off from the page.

    As if by the breath of God.

    I will go on, and stitch the story

    that lives now on the canvas of the fabric,

    I mistress of the silken thread

    as it twists and knots, leaving traces

    that are the marks of this gentle kind of love.

  • Love Letters



    The first letter, short and sweet and easy,

    was written in a casual hand

    (like children in the playground passing a ball)

    just to say to a friend from long ago,

    Hey, how are you, what’s going on?

    And I had the letter from him, in response.

    The second took more care, more patience,

    more thought to frame exactly what I wanted to convey.

    I sat a little longer, considering,

    making the words casual, soft, slow:

    I thought of you today, at dinner;

    you really are the greatest poet I have known.

    The third I lingered over longer.

    I considered and crafted, to make it ideal.

    The whole was growing more potent;

    also more precarious: as if one word out of place

    would make our whole relationship topple.

    So perfectly I crafted the letters –

    at the same time, full of longing:

    I thought of you today. And a thousand things

    I have wanted to say to you for long

    I will try to convey in these words I write …

    The fourth letter took longer still.

    Not yet had I said just what I wanted to say.

    We did not use that word – so potent

    it was in my mind, though; and if in his,

    I did not, could never know, I guess,

    except to look back on our letters –

    letters of longing, letters of luck, letters of –

    The fifth letter is yet to be.

    Any word more I write to him

    would compromise me in my very self.

    To say the word I most want to say –

    how can I? Is it not obvious to him?

    Yet do I have to write exactly that,

    exactly what I want to say –

    would he not know if it were said in tangents?

    If I were to write it,

    I know just what I would say.

    Yes – this I would say in a letter,

    who cannot say it to his face,

    and would let the words work there

    a few moments, striking a chord

    if they may.

    But maybe these words are best unsaid.

    Maybe it would be too much a risk

    to thus lay bare the contents of my heart.

    For words become (at some time) actions.

    If ever I see him again, my phantom interlocutor,

    maybe I will say to him what is felt –

    or else go on forever, never spilling, never saying

    the love I wanted to convey in those letters.

  • My Irish Ring



    It isn’t gold or the One Ring.

    I doubt it has value at all.

    I found it downtown in an Irish store,

    in a bin of jewelry marked down.

    I combed through the jumble to find it.

    It slips on my finger just so.

    On the face of the band,

    there are holding two hands

    with a heart in between them on top.

    The band’s made of silver,

    the hands are of gold.

    I love it now, I’ll love it till old

    am I, and every day,

    it will crown my finger

    and with me will stay.

    The little adornment, I do not begrudge

    how it slips on my finger, a gem and a mark

    of a beauty that goes beyond mere appeal

    of the ring with the hands

    and the light golden seal.

    A ring like all that have been smithed

    to lie on the finger of those who have lived

    from time before time, when rich was the scene

    and gold rings were given by king and by queen.

    When the art of the smith was prized above all,

    from the field of the battle to the golden mead hall,

    to tame the earth and all its resources,

    to mark the paths and also the courses

    of the purpose we call our own,

    and also divine: so hammered in metal,

    a thin golden line.

    Of all things of beauty, the ring I see best,

    being of circular, unending glory:

    from any one spot on the circle, the knot

    carries forth all the full story.

  • Medieval Codex



    An object stands in front of me:

    beautiful for me to see.

    Fine, with brown leather bound,

    golden tooling all around.

    Inside, the quires tightly sewn,

    folds and pockets that are shown:

    what genius has made

    the binding, quires overlaid.

    In some gracious abbey grounds,

    the writing in the book astounds:

    gothic in rotunda script,

    perfect letters capped and lipped.

    Meliora sunt ubera tua vino.

    Glad in writing once to show

    a love so deeply felt:

    love in Latin perfect spelt.

    In red and blue the floriation

    rounds out perfect the creation,

    initials square illuminated

    with bird and person historiated

    and vellum the medium where

    one wrote, side flesh or hair.

    Letters in a column bold

    to tell the story that is told

    and always to convey

    what happened yesteryear, yesterday.

    Knights and all their ladies fair

    striving to be everywhere

    the ones remembered long:

    a potent joust, a love so wrong.

    Medieval codex, I salute you.

    You have carried me through and through

    back to all those golden days

    which reading this book still conveys,

    bound with quires careful made,

    love well written and displayed.

    I will forever always need

    what lies in you still more to read.