Dear Sylvia: Les Nymphéas
by Joanna Grant
Sylvia, I love you, I wanted
to tell you that they keep on coming,
the girls who remember, these nymphs
wearing their many allegiances, this one
a Bardot, that one, a Monroe,
the other one a Just Kids Patti Smith,
their sketchbooks, their notebooks
empty as yet, but their minds, their hearts,
their souls full of hopes, of dreams.
Many silly, to be sure, derivative,
no doubt, most fated not to come to pass,
but Sylvia, you know, some of them might,
some of them will, and I wanted to tell you
that L’Orangerie, it smells of fresh-dried paint
and that Monet’s nymphs, his water lilies,
still float here, a garden in the heart of the city
Joanna Grant holds a Ph.D. in British and American literature, specializing in fictional as well as nonfiction travel narratives of the Middle East. She spent eight years in that region, notably two years in Afghanistan, teaching writing, mythology, and public speaking classes to American soldiers and gathering materials for her own memoir, which she is currently completing as part of an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University under the direction of Mark Sundeen. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in journals including Guernica and Prairie Schooner.
