Soft umbrella no match for rock hail, Siri issuing
directions from my backpack, I’m lost in the streets
of old Utrecht. I walk with you, says a man holding

out his striped umbrella. When I complain about rain,
he chides, It’s good for you. In Catherijneconvent,
I learn about the Beeldenstorm—when 17th century

“reformed” mobs burned Latin Bibles and churches,
ransacked vestments, looted silver and gold, rioted
against mink-stoled Catholics selling indulgences.

I’d like to think if the crusaders had seen the silver mines
of Guanajuato, where hump-backed boys and men,
chained beneath the ground, spent entire lives hacking

out plata for the gods of Europe, the truth of their own
privilege might have tempered the storm of outrage.
Yet that’s asking a lot. At the Vermeer exhibition,

I swoon at green velvet glow, the glisten on a wealthy
woman’s high forehead, the blush on a stone wall.
And the million-dollar glint in one girl’s eye recalls

my incandescent body at twenty, when I believed my
fortune fair as long as I meant well—when I imagined
the sun alone could reflect light on the waning moon.

Kathryn Jordan’s poems placed/won Honorable Mention this past year in the Connecticut Poetry Award, Steve Kowit, and Muriel Craft Bailey awards. Her work appears in The Sun, New Ohio Review, Atlanta Review and Comstock Review, among others. Kathryn loves to hike the hills, listening for bird song to translate to poems.