Home > Work > Finding Baba Yaga: A Short Novel in Verse
1 " Like the piano player, I have memory in my fingertips. I watch words spill out creating worlds, inventing colors, bridging generations. "
― Jane Yolen , Finding Baba Yaga: A Short Novel in Verse
2 " Stories retold are stories remade. "
3 " Somewhere becomes a nightmare. I knock on no doors, make no phone calls. Nowhere becomes my destination. You can find it on the blank spaces of any free map in any old store. Just turn a corner of your mind, and it’s there. "
4 " No one sees her of course. She doesn’t exist unless you count bad dreams. Yet still she flies, "
5 " She’s gone on that long road into adulthood from which none of us returns. "
6 " The Baba gives me paper, and a pen that sputters ink. Write, she says, tell the true Though you may have to lie to do it. "
7 " How can this be, this great magic, that makes real the unreal, the not-actual into a kind of factless fictual, turns lies into the True? Don’t ask me, for I am new at this work, new at telling my own truth. All I can start with is Once Upon A Time, that oldest and truest of lies. "
8 " Words shouldn’t be dirty or cleanBut definitely sweet,On the tongue, in the mind. "
9 " You think you know this story. You do not. "
10 " I’ve many questions, but am not eager to know the Baba’s answers. They’ll be hard kernels between my teeth. Biting down becomes a question of physics, a reply only dentists can give. "
11 " I learned to write poetry, telling the truth through metaphor, simile, straight-forward lies. "
12 " And the deep thrummingof the forest that too many people mistake for silence. "
13 " You want to tell this story,perhaps now you will. "
