(written) from right to left and from left to right in alternate lines
(Gk. Adv. – as ox turns in ploughing).
…………………….The Concise Oxford Dictionary

I’m teaching Fatima to read
Her finger follows mine from west to east
Then leads me back from east to west
Mapping the methods of her old country
On the new, her mind moves like a shuttle in a loom
Weaving a cloth that tries to reconcile her two worlds
Joining up threads, tying off knots
Maintaining an even tension

Digging for meaning
Her finger is a plough carving successive furrows
In the dense topsoil of a foreign text
Her brow furrowed too – she is a scholar
Who tries to decipher mysterious inscriptions
In ancient stones

Bewitched by the strange black symbols
Fatima, the priestess, mutters soft incantations
Ratuig reh deyalp yllek

But its my job to break the magic
In English, I tell her, we always read from left to right
Soon I have reduced her spell to the banality
Kelly played her guitar

Bored Fatima stares out the classroom window
At a large black bird. It’s almost lunchtime

‘Boustrophedon’ first appeared in Antipodes Dec. 1999)

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Janet Reinhardt is a Sydney poet whose work has appeared in journals and anthologies throughout Australia, the UK and the USA: mot recently in Cordite, Rochford St. Review and forthcoming in Hecate, and WA Inc. Poetry d’Amour.

Another work by Janet Reinhardt
‘Refugee’
appear in the print version of P76 Issue 9
available for $20 (plus postage and handling)
from Rochford Cottage Bookshop

P76 issue 9: Poetries of place/ displacement/ diaspora/ odyssey: On-line Edition. Table of Contents

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