{a little John Donne}

Though born and raised on a hog farm in Iowa, JG was another who ended up deposited onshore in Scotland. She’d come in-country with someone, but found herself alone before long, and simply made the best of it. JG is good at doing that, in a number of ways.

A quirky, elfin, auburn-haired mighty-mite (or, as our Scottish friends called her, “a tough wee ginger lass”) JG is one of those people who is just…intensely herself. Truly, she “speaks as she finds,” and she is as you find her as well – J. is a great heaping dose of “what you see is what you get,” which was a great relief to have in a friend in Scotland where I sometimes felt like everyone was reading from a script in a film that I hadn’t ever seen.

J’s working a gig in Somerset, England just now – she’s a large animal vet, so there are sheep to be wrestled into giving birth, and she’s up round the clock these raw Spring days. But, should you see a green-eyed girl, small hands clamped over protruding hind legs, smeared with and crouched in mud, gently crooning to an ewe to “get on with it,” you may have found her. If, under the roomy neck of her ratty, wooly jumper, you discover the last three lines of this poem tattooed on her shoulder blade, you know for sure you’ll have found my buddy.

So, today, for J., a little Donne.

XIV.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

– from The Holy Sonnets, 1896