Poet Julie Poitras Santos wrote this week’s poem, “Viking Dublin,” after looking at ancient Viking weaving artifactsin the National Museum in Dublin. Poitras Santos explains that in this poem she explores “the relationship between textiles and language, how text is woven and constructed like a cloth.” I love this poem’s attention to the names and shapes of these very old cloth-making tools, and its deeply imagined curiosity about how language has shaped us.

Poitras Santos’ writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Leonardo, The Café Review, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Chart, Living Maps Review, The New Guard, and Be Wilder: A Word Portland Anthology, among others. Also a visual artist, her artwork has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad. She is an associate professor at Maine College of Art & Design in Portland.

Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, indigenous writers, LGBTQ+ writers, and other underrepresented voices. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water. 

Viking Dublin

In the National Museum in Dublin

When we were weavers just learning to speak 

the language of cloth through spindle and whorl

with shears and needles

you struck your wooden weaver’s sword with knotted handle 

tight against the weft, the weft.

I fed you thread from the wooden wool or line winder

through the four directions holes at the edges 

of tablets used for making braids

and borders. We couldn’t know the text, the text 

would separate our thought from things 

and create a ghost between us. We couldn’t know

the war of words and image then, it was just a magic

trick we learned while playing games. Before

translation began to make a traveling cloth, a cloth

bore you and me in our animal capes, 

the red deer antler-comb keeping knots loose.

There was nothing holding there between us 

no between to carry across, across.

– Julie Poitras Santos

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Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Viking Dublin,” copyright 2014 by Julie Poitras Santos, appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.