Mia Francis

Beneath The Hawthorn Tree

It began with a letter—or, perhaps it is more accurate to say it was a note, a gallop of lines strung out on the page, quickly done, but by a confident hand, with a swollen cursive unabashed at the swallowing of space. The edge of the sheet was uneven, crumpled, quickly gathered up and torn, and on turning it over, I found it to be the contents page of a book, a translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Inexplicably I felt a flicker in the back of my mind at this, like that of an old memory yawning—a light flaring on in a dark window. Flipped back over and smoothed, I read: