Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli

Poet and visual artist Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli has been a Fellow at both the Virginia Center for the Arts and the Ragdale Foundation. Her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Pittsburgh Review of Poetry, Raleigh Review, Watershed Review, and Poet Lore. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Seton Hill University and an MFA/Poetry from Warren Wilson College. A native of North Braddock, Pennsylvania, she lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

 

Again You Call to Me

- for my father Again you call to me and we step out onto the road leaving the farm leaving the village the Berounka its currents of muddy water leaving the rib-kicking uncles and the castle near the school with its trees of red apples flushed as the shaking hands of the priest who calls and calls after you as you hold my arm and we go on passing through cemeteries up hills and down your mouth twisting through roots for words spilling over— voda for water, you say to me— lod’ for boat, matka and otec, hurry, hurry—your garbled sound seeding a language in me setting my compass spinning us west and solitary you in your hand-sewn suit worsted and green me hiding my eyes from whomever we meet

“ Studying basic Czech language as an adult was a way for me to connect with my father in his later years. Born in a Pennsylvania steel mill town, at age fourteen he’d been sent back to the Czech uncles who would surely teach him, his mother thought, how to work and thus would break his willful spirit. It was his stories of that faraway place that engaged me most when I was young. Later, raising my own sons and more aware of how young he was then, I tried to understand how he must have felt, returning after three years away, hardly able, he said, to form English words with his tongue. Ever the outsider, no one was there to meet him at the train station and so he climbed the hills toward home, dressed in that green hand-sewn suit. ”