At first sight, a new poem can be challenging, especially if the title prompts the question, What do I need to know, to understand it? If we glance first at its shape and size (Will it be much of a challenge?), this poem’s eight triplets, frugally punctuated, look reassuring – but of course, there’s more to it than that.
  
I suspect Elizabeth Smither would not have set out to write 24 lines, but found as she wrote that this might be enough for what she had to say, and that number of lines can also be arranged in a number of ways – as couplets, triplets, quatrains, or paragraphs.  

Her title invites us to imagine something, this ‘travelling reliquary’: a wooden case perhaps, with handles? But what is inside it, what’s in the poem? 

Right away, things are happening: ‘We are sitting talking in our pew…’, but who are ‘we’? The poet, obviously, with friends or acquaintances, perhaps tourists; and ‘we’ must include the reader. We are probably not worshippers at a service; did we just sit down there for a rest? But there’s an air of impatience to ‘while the reliquary takes up the aisle’ – it’s in the way, we have to sit here and look at this ‘nice piece of furniture’ or whatever, containing (we are told) a finger belonging to a ‘dismembered’ saint. That word neatly echoes remembered, almost as if they were opposites, and both would be appropriate for Saint Teresa, fragments of whom are said to exist in many places. 

Halfway through the poem the speaker recalls ‘the surgeon’ offering her, as a souvenir, her own 'relic', a flake of bone, to which she says, 'No thanks'. And then suddenly, excitingly, the action turns through 180 degrees, and we really need to pay attention (no talking!) to what is being said. 
  
13   But if I could travel in a reliquary 
       and spy on two women talking 
       instead of looking at me: finger 

16   no less but all of me 
       in the air, the legend of eating 
       partridges with the fervour of praying 

19   and my dress with the coloured hem 
       I wore to give myself away 
       a gift no one was asking.

That resounding colon in line 15, and the repeated ‘me’, mark the new viewpoint as that of the Saint herself: even if no more than a ‘finger’, it is entirely her, held commandingly ‘in the air’. Even if in the next lines much must be ineffable, since we are dealing with sainthood, the third triplet seems to speak of her girlhood innocence as a 'Bride of Christ'. And though ‘a gift no one was asking’ is well put, is there a hint of self-betrayal in ‘to give myself away’? 

But now, as the poem comes to an end, and ‘Instead [of paying attention to me] they go on talking while… / …my little house… / is closing for the night’ – finally she catches their attention: ‘Then they come’. 

What they will see is what we have seen, if we’ve been paying attention: the poet, in her work. The poet making her poem.

alan roddick