By Susan McCaslin

The following poem is from an unpublished sequence in progress about the 12th-century German mystic, Hildegard of Bingen – visionary, artist, nun, theologian, musician, composer, natural scientist, herbalist, and cosmologist. In the sequence, I imagine Hildegard being transported through time and space to the Fraser Valley of the 21st century to comment on the situation of migrant workers.

Hildegard of Bingen Considers the Migrant Farm Workers 

 

Walking near the fields and vineyards near Bingen,

I would sometimes pause to chat with the peasants,

offer them poultices for their ailments,

trade herbal remedies – they who toiled the seasonal rotations.

 

I, born of privileged nobility, though straitened

as a child, kept my visions to myself,

wondering if I might be thought a heretic

or of the devil’s school.

 

If not for Volmar, my confessor, 

who thought my visions real,

I might have let them go

not let him scribe the record, authenticate the fire.

Had Bernard of Clairvaux not praised them to the Pope,

these seeds of contemplation might have died.

Yet Pope Eugene blessed the greening persistence,

suggesting I write down all I’d seen and heard.

 

And so, unlike most women of my time,

I became un-silenced, 

influential, unanchored, 

free to speak my truth to power.

 

Yet now along a Fraser Valley dike,

crosswise in time, little has changed –

elites still thrive on labour of the poor.

Systems, whether feudal or capitalist, 

 

other others, caged-in theologies 

create new cages

where hierarchy is the order of things

and few ask, “Who benefits from this way of seeing?”

 

Temporary foreign workers flown in for seasonal work

leave homes in the Punjab, Mexico, 

desperate to feed their families—

harvest cranberries, blueberries, sprayed with herbicides.

Underpaid, squeezed into cramped quarters– 

undistancedduringthepandemic,

some fall ill, unable to switch jobs if abused,

denied immigrant status, unionization,

 

while above them on the dike,

glancing at the workers as if through Plexiglas,

women, coiffed and buff, stroll with

well-groomed dogs fresh from doggie spas. 

 

Tattooed teens in sports bras 

count off calories on their apps,

men in camo gear flaunt shirtless six packs,

elders comment dreamily on sunset over Mount Baker

 

while down in the fields, white trucks 

pick up exhausted workers

conveying them to temporary quarters,

unsettled dreams of an uncertain future.

 

I with the heron, stabat mater (standing mother)

watch feel it’s time to strike

to ask again: What does mysticism

have to do with justice? Contemplation with action?

Susan McCaslin is a Canadian poet living in Glen Valley outside Fort Langley, B.C. Her most recent volume is Into the Open: Poems New and Selected (Inanna, 2017). In 2012, Susan initiated The Han Shan Poetry Project, a successful effort to help save a rainforest near her home along the Fraser River. Susan is a retired English professor from Douglas College where she taught English and Creative Writing for twenty-three years.