Homesick (Letter to Ovid)

by Maureen Scott Harris

            Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

                        – Ovid, Heroides

Dear Exile, everyone knows of your misery

in Tomis. Its rivers plunged down rocky slopes,

refused to release the land’s animating spirits.

Surrounded by fishers speaking in tongues

you could name none of their catch. Eight years

of letters begging Imperial forgiveness never

bought your return to Rome, the theatre

for your infamous poems of dalliance, its

countryside alive with transformations.

Did your mother tongue grow rusty? Rumours

circulated. Some said you wrote poems in Getic.

Your late letters home, still pleading, were framed

by the Black Sea’s seasons, its weather blowing in.

Centuries later I write you from the murky edge

of the Anthropocene where we are all exiles,

ignorant of the land’s vocabularies, besotted

with our own. I imagine you beside that tideless

sea the Greeks called hospitable. Your mind turns 

again towards transformation. The carp on Roman

dinner tables was hauled from that sea. Beware

the Romans, you think, savouring how the fish

shines, garbed in its local name.