The Hermit's House

 

by Brett Rutherford

So he has raised himself a house—

a squat and brooding carpenter it was

who strung these clapboards in their gambreled

eaves! The twisted spines of elder trees

lean on its walls suggestively, a clutch

of branches fit to snap the heads of birds—

whatever the month they issue the brittleness

of dried-up leaves, to somersault

the wagon-rutted walk, and pile

in bottomless heaps on his untended

lawn. That the gate remains open

is not so much a mark of tenancy

as hingeless ruin, and though

a charcoal breath and sputterings

emerge at the chimney top,

the lampless porch and broken steps

alike suggest abandonment. But here,

thrown up in rustless height to a slit

of reluctant sun, the postman’s box

opens its mouth at the haunted edge,

spells out his name, encourages messages,

a beacon of normalcy at Usher’s door,

beyond whose mundane purpose his house

broods low like a gorged and sleeping owl.

It is only a house among houses,

a curious blotch on a cheery Victorian street.

 

There is no tarn, no hound,

no family crypt,

and yet these swollen clapboards tell

of darker dreams in eldritch books within.

The panes admit no sunlight, I see,

but the moon and the Pole Star’s rays

beam down through cobwebbed corridors.

One window’s barred, the room beyond

an empty blackness, a hermit cell

whose necromantic occupant

has razored off his eyelids

to watch in perpetual wakefulness

for those who will come from the outer orbs,

streaming down ravenous to slay and feed

on all that lives — save him alone.

 

When all this happens, he plans to serve

narcotic tea and delicate pastries

to the arrived new gods. Amid the nods

and smiles, some wry jest he offers up

will prompt a water of eye, a clap

of one tentacle against another,

and he will take his place among them.

More Creepy Poems Than You Can Count

 

My huge collection, Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems, contains all my dark and creepy work up through mid-2019. Like Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," I have expanded this work like a huge ball of string. Vampires, Golems, werewolves, mummies and ghouls abound, as well as many dark things inspired by or about H.P. Lovecraft. This is the ultimate poetic story-book for things to read aloud around the campfire, or to frighten young children into hiding under the covers. The 416-page book is now available as a PDF ebook for just $2.99. And remember, every time a copy of this book is purchased, a demon gets his wings.

Order PDF Ebook

At Innsmouth Harbor

The catalog of jetsam —
things washed ashore at Innsmouth:
a gnawed-through baby rattle; five
matched silver spoons of serpentine design;
a multitude of basalt pebbles, each
a perfect copy of its brethren, angled
obtuse with the hint of an eye,
black and unseeing (on the obverse,
an alien cuneiform, unreadable),
coins all of an unknown empire;
the rusted machinery of lost umbrellas
(from where since no one ever in Innsmouth
has ever owned or needed one);
clots of dank seaweed and curds of ooze
astir with phosphorescent pulsings;
a human skeleton, a chain, a cinder block;
blue bottle labeled tincture of laudanum,
wrapped in soft velvet with an ivory carving,
priapic secret of a ship captain’s widow;
an octopus impaled with the periscope
of a German U-2 submarine; a map
of the New England coastline inscribed
entirely in Runic letters; a trident,
vertical, twelve feet from top to bottom,
awaiting whoever dares to claim it;
and finally, as always, coats, hats and trousers,
all manner of ladies’ gowns and negligées
cast off on the rocks at Devil’s Reef,
all for the taking if anyone cares.

There is no catalog of flotsam, no list
of the things that will not come to shore:
the ten-lobed all-seeing eyes of the ghosts
of Trilobites, mandarins of the ocean deep;
the wary, watchful ammoniac waiting
of Architeuthis, the giant squid; the pound
and beat of the tide-drum, counting all down
to the world’s end, the sun’s death, the pull
of all into the dark heart of the iron stone
where everything that was and will be comes to rest.

The Special Ward at Butler Hospital

A new "poem-monologue" to be read at Ladd Observatory, Brown University, in the annual commemoration for H.P. Lovecraft.

Ah, here we are. For the state of these hallways
I must apologize. The janitors won’t clean here:
It’s in their contract since the 1950s. We make do.
I hope that handsome suit of yours will not get soiled:
I haven’t seen one cut like that since my father’s time.
There’s nothing really down here, you see. I’m sure
You’ll want to inspect our new outpatient clinic. No?
Ward L? A special ward? Can’t say I know of it.
These doors are locked. They’re always locked.
There’s nothing to see there, really? Inspector,
we’ve done the annual visit the same each year.
You’ve never asked about this basement. Oh?
An inquiry? Grand jury, you say? I’m sorry, no:
I’m not allowed to open this. Subpoena? I see;
Yes, yes, it all seems clearly worded: “Ward L,
locked rooms in Butler’s basement. Inspect.”
I still don’t think I’m authorized to open — ah,
I see your two friends’ badges there, and, oh,
I’d rather you not display those handguns
considering our population here. Ward L.
The key is here somewhere. You’re making me
exceedingly nervous with that .38. Wrong key.
Damn! Here it is! It’s open! It’s open!
You’ll need a moment to adjust to the dimness.

The men are on this side,
     behind the plexiglass.
There’s a certain family likeness for some:
those lantern jaws, that gait aloof and awkward,
all dressed in their grandfather’s suits.
Every one of them thinks he’s H.P. Lovecraft.
Untreatable, incurable (and certainly unemployable);
nothing short of lobotomy will pull them out of it.
Last count, three hundred. They come from everywhere.
Most states outsource their Lovecraft maniacs;
Their loss, our gain. At least it’s easy to feed them.
Crackers and chili, a slice of pie.
They’re calm except for those nights
On which we bring them ice cream.
They eat it off each other’s bodies, something
you’d pay me not to have to watch.

The Lovecraft women are on the other side.
No, only a dozen or so right now. They suicide
as fast as we get them in. The “Howards”
are not remotely interested in meeting them.
Some lie there at night, exposing themselves
toward the Hyades; some play with rats
and give them endearing little names.
Most of them just read, and lick the wallpaper,
and fill up the room with plush toy octopi
(we sell them in the gift store up above).
A number of them turn out, on closer inspection,
to actually be men. We call them Cthulhu’s nuns.
Every woman who ever reads Lovecraft
winds up this way. They really should ban him.

Here in the back, we have the “machinery.”
There’s the lobotomy kit, and over there
the latest in electroshock, but as I said,
they’re pretty much incurable. Just take a look:
they’re not particularly unhappy. They read;
endless long letters they write to imaginary friends
(of course we never mail them); and they dispute
among themselves for hours fine points
of eldrich lore and Arkham geography.

Report what you like. I think we’re kind to them.
Back in the 60s a former director said, “Empty the place,”
and so we had them all drafted to the infantry:
imagine a platoon of Lovecrafts in Vietnam!
This is not a bad life. It’s not as though
they could go out and get jobs, you know.
And they’re not such gentlemen as one
would think: that Negro attendant they tore
to bits in 1953. Oh my goodness.

So that’s the tour. Gentlemen, your guns.
Thank you for bringing the Inspector down
without his being any the wiser. Just tie him down
to that bed by the electroshock. There, there,
Inspector, it will be fine before long. Your boss
is repressing all evidence of that sacrifice you made
during your South Pacific vacation last year –
all that mess, tsk! tsk! and no Cthulhu
to show for your trouble. You’ll be all right.
You’re going to have three hundred best friends,
and they’ll be just like you. You could live
to a hundred down here. All those books to read
and we even have our own closed-circuit TV:
all Lovecraft, all the time. And now, stop talking.
I’ll just tape over your mouth so you can listen.
Just for you. The rats. The rats in the wall.

On the Island of Pohnpei

A Dramatic Monologue

Been to the ruins, have you? Not yet? I can tell
you’re one of those scholarly types. Deep.
I like a firm handshake. New Englanders
come from that Innsmouth place a lot —
limp, clammy handshakes is all you get
from one of them. I know their ways and signs
and can pass when I have to. Just slouch
and tie a scarf around your neck. Feel sorry
when I see their kids, all handsome-like,
until they grow into that “ancestral look.”
Still, there are homelier types around here.

You look more Boston to me, averse
as you seem to be to sunlight. I see the way
you pick your table, one beam of light
on that book you always carry, the rest of you
in shadow. If I painted any more
that would make a fine study. So, Harvard,
is it? you on one of those expeditions?
No, never seen anyone from Arkham before.
Miska — Miskatonic, you say? Can’t say I ever
heard of it, though we’ve had scholarly types
who wouldn’t say where they’re from
and what they’re doing. Sometimes they unload
crate after crate from the cargo ship
then hole up back and above the ruins.
Good pickings for scavengers, too, since
more than half of those fellows disappeared. Sink holes,
you see — they have a way of opening up
when you least expect it. Beneath those ruins,
no one can guess how far down it can go.
Funny thing is, there are tunnels down there
that go deep below the ocean, yet dry
as a Baptist on a blue Sunday.

A lot of those other scholars go sun-mad
or catch some funny diseases from the village girls.
One old professor, philologist I think,
said he would never sleep again,
so he razored off his eyelids. He’s off
in the madhouse in Wellington. Thank you, yes,
I do know just about everybody. Used to be
you could count the white folk on two hands.

Now with the hippies and the Lovecraft tourists,
this place is getting too crowded for me.
I’ve done a museum’s worth of paintings
in those ruins, and did a lot of diving
in my younger days. There’s more of those ruins
under the water than above, you know.
Those — what do you learned folk call them —
Encylco — Yes, “Cyclopean” — that’s the word
I was searching for. Funny thing is that out there
and down below, it goes so deep you could swear
it was never above water, not for a day,
so how could these Polynesians have built it?

I sold a lot of painting to visitors — the ruins,
a little wildlife, sometimes I’d get a village girl
or some boys to pose for me, very classical.
Nowadays they come and ask for tentacles.
They want that god (I’m not going to say his
name), dragging his squid face over the landscape.
I want to spit every time I hear “R’lyeh!”
Seeing as you’re not one of the hippies,
I’d be happy to take you to the ruins. Easy
it is to lose your way, and as I said,
there are places that fall away. You might
even find the skeleton of one of your own professors,
ha! Just joking! You don’t need to look that way.
Fact is, I want to get off this island.
A chance at a gallery in Sydney, fancy
I’d finally get to see Hong Kong or Thailand.

It’s the hippies, you see, these last two years,
since the stuff they call “trans-heroin” arrived.
Nepal is practically empty and the Afghanis
are mad as hell that some unknown white powder
has pushed all other drugs aside. Now Pohnpei
is the Haight-Ashbury of the South Pacific.
They’re building hostels on the beach.
Three Lebanese, ah, shall I call them
“businessmen,” and some Russians, shall I call them
“silent partners,” have set up a dance club there —
see the smoke? — not twenty yards from the ruins.
Since you’re a scholar, and I can trust you,
I’ll let you in on the secret: the white powder
comes from here, from fabled R’lyeh, Pohnpei Island.

Take it just once, and all you want to do is sleep,
and in that sleep — my god, what they tell me!
Those so-called gentle hippies. One sat there,
right where you’re sitting, and boasted to me,
“Last night, in my dream, I killed a thousand men.
The powder wore off before I could finish eating them.”
At first, it came from divers, not bringing up pearls,
but caked-up minerals from an outcrop,
a crazy place where those ancient stones
had fallen into something and the white
stuff, over many centuries, extruded outward.
But now the Lebanese, on the ploy of laying
a cement foundation for their nightclub
jack-hammered their way down to the vein,
the mother lode of chalk-like powder.
The Russians watch everything, sit down below
in what they call “The Kitchen,” Kalashnikovs
at the ready. There goes the neighborhood.
I have to listen to the thump-thump-a-thump
of the living dead zombie dance music
some nights till three in the morning.
There’s a neon sign, oh, you’ll see it
with tacky Hawaiian lettering, that reads
LOUNGE  R’LYEH — HOOKAH  ALL  NIGHT.

Inside, the hookah pipes emerge
from the floor below, where, in the “kitchen,”
three idiot village girls tend to the charcoal
burner, the bubbling cauldron of water.
The tubes run upward and through the floor,
right to the hookah tables. And they sit,
and they sit, and they sit. The waiters
empty their pockets. Dawn comes,
and the smokers awaken outside, piled
in a heap on top of one another. They smile.
They don’t even care that they’ve been robbed.
Each night at dusk there are more of them,
pressing against the bamboo enclosure,
waiting for the neon sign to come on.

You look agitated, professor. I guess
you didn’t realize what kind of place
you’ve come to for your holiday. All right:
for your research, your serious research. It’s fine,
I guess, to spend your days afield.
The ruins, yes, the ruins are beautiful.
You just don’t want to be here at night.
Did I mention the suicides? The beach,
when the tide comes in, is not so wholesome.
Drug tourists must, of necessity, exhaust
their bank accounts, and so they hope to join
the ranks of those who never awaken.
The Russians remove the bodies by noon.
Bad for business, you see.
Sooner or later they’ll just export the stuff.
They’ll close the lounge. Instead, a kind
of factory will sit there, extracting and packaging.

Oh, you’re a wry one. What’s that you said?
“Unless what’s down below awakens.”
Don’t tell me you’re one of those Believers
in that thing whose name I won’t pronounce.
All right, all right, let go of me! I’ll say it:
Cthulhu, Cthulhu, Cthulhu, damn you!
I’ve read Lovecraft, okay? Look, I’m a realist.
My paintings look like photos. There’s nothing
here, nothing whatever. Yes, yes, I follow.
They’re what? No, don’t make me think that,
don’t make me say that. You’re hurting me!
Fine! Just calm down now. I heard you.
I wish I hadn’t heard you.
Damn you intellectuals, connecting everything.
They’re ... smoking ... the ...brains ... of ... Cthulhu.

Written for H. P. Lovecraft’s Birthday Celebration
Providence, Rhode Island, Swan Point Cemetery
August 19, 2012

Keziah Mason

A little poem about the birth of a famous literary witch, and the birth of her familiar, "Brown Jenkin"

    After H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” (1932)

“Something’s not right
     about Keziah,”
the midwife tells
     the scholar father,
     Pastor Mason,
the Salem Divine.
The doting mother
won’t hear of it.
“Bad auspices,” the father nods.
“I told you so.”

The mother cradles it
     as midwife scurries off
with rags and the bloody
     umbilical,
an accusing serpent.
“Baby Keziah,” the mother croons,
“my perfect child.”

“Not right, bad auspices,
     bad numerology,
too many vowels,
bad luck to have alpha
     follow zed that way.”

She waves him away.
Anxious, he follows
     the weary midwife,
     Old Goodie Brown.
Their eyes meet.
“Tell me, “ he asks.
“Why didn’t you say
if I have a son or daughter?”

“Neither,” she says.
“Who knows,” she shrugs,
“what it will grow to?”

“Deformed?” he guesses.
She shakes her head.
“Hermaphrodite?”
Her eyes avoid him.
“The ancients write
of such creatures.”

The midwife hesitates,
taking the small purse
he discreetly offers.
“I’ve seen odd things,
good Pastor Mason,
but never this:
not male, not female.
What’s there,
I’d call machinery,
and what use God
or the Devil intends for it
I’ll not be thinking on.”

She hurries out
into the snowstorm,
the bloodied rag
held tight,
not one but two
umbilicals,
a black-furred thing
     whose razor teeth
gnaw and consume
     the after-birth.

 “There, there,” she coos,
     petting its fur,
as a tiny facsimile
of the Pastor’s face
stares up at her.
“Old Goodie Brown
     will look out
for her little Jenkin,
my perfect child.”

Then the thing cleared
its tiny throat
and after a dry
and preliminary chittering
it thanked her
in fourteen languages.

Pluto Demoted

A poem protesting the move to strip Pluto of its designation as a planet, and a tribute to Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto on photographic negatives of star photographs in 1932. There's also a reference to H.P. Lovecraft, who called the as-yet-undetected ninth planet "Yuggoth" in his writings.

No longer a planet, they say!
Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth*, Nine
is now a nothing,
a rock among rocks

despite the tug of its companion,

silent and airless Charon,

the loyal circling
of Nix and Erys.**

Now you are a “mini-world,”

an oversize asteroid

tumbling in dustbelt

so dark and distant

our sun is but a blob

of wavering starlight.

World of death and darkness,

methane, monoxide molting

in every orbiting,

shunned by the sun that made you,

must you now be snubbed by man?

How demote a planet

so lustrous in history?

It has its gods! It has its gods!

Can they evict

  the Lord of the Dead

with just a say-so?

What of the millions of souls

whose home was Hades?

What of beautiful Persephone

who shuttles still

   on a high-speed comet

for her six-month residency

as mistress of the underworld?

What of the heroes and philosophers,

the shades of pagan times

who teem those basalt cities

warming the Plutonian night

with odes and songs and serenades?

Are they to be homeless vagabonds,

slowed from their distant heartbeat

to the stillness of absolute zero?

****

At first, it was “Planet X,”

   out there somewhere

   because Neptune wobbled,

   nodded its rings

   toward Death’s domain.

Then a Kansas farm boy

obsessed with the stars

   ground his own mirrors

   built his own telescope

   with car parts and farm equipment.

Hailstones destroyed the farm crops.

   The telescope survived.

The boy sent drawings of Mars

    and Jupiter

to Lowell Observatory —

Come work for us, they said.

He hopped a train, had just enough

   cash for a one-way fare.

And then, in monk-like hermitage

he toiled at Flagstaff,

comparing sky photographs,

hundreds of thousands of stars,

negative over negative to light,

searching for celestial wanderers,

planetoi, asteroids, comets

that moved when everything else

stood still in the cosmos.

Clyde Tombaugh, twenty-four,

surveyed a sky

where fifteen million lights

the brightness of Pluto twinkled

but only one was Pluto.

He found it.

***

They sought him out

in his retirement,

those fellows

from the Smithsonian,

asked for his home-made instrument

for their permanent collection.

“Hell no,” he said,

“I’m still using it.”

***

I would as soon

forget Kansas as Pluto.

Tell Tombaugh’s ghost

his planet is not a planet!

I can see the old man now,

just off the death-barge

he hopped from Charon,

greeting the Lords of Acheron,

that rusted tube of telescope

under his arm,

scouting a mountaintop

for his next observatory.

Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth, Nine!

Change at your peril

a thing once named!

Yuggoth is the name assigned to the Ninth planet, before its discovery, in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
* Nix and Erys are two smaller satellites of Pluto.

H P Lovecraft at the Newsstand

 Caution: This poem has inside jokes for fans of H.P. Lovecraft. 

H P LOVECRAFT AT THE NEWSSTAND

                on seeing a Justin Bieber special issue of US Magazine

COLLECTORS' EDITION

SIX HOT
POSTERS INSIDE!

H. P. LOVECRAFT:
MY
PRIVATE
WORLD

Exclusive photos
inside my bedroom

My New
Letter-Writing
Life

How I Cope
With Being Unknown

WIN A TRIP
TO MEET
HOWARD.

South Pacific Nightmare:
Edward and Bella
Breakup.
Eddie Storms Out
Over Howard-Bella
R’lyeh Love-Nest.

Online:
Howard Lovecraft Totally Naked OMG!

New Howard Lovecraft
Six-Pack Abs.

More Howard Shirtless Pictures
Click Here.

Howard and Sonia —
Our Embarrassing
First Date:
Young Author Panics
At First Sight of Spaghetti.

“He was An Ugly Baby”:
Howard’s Mom Tells Diary
In Weird Rant
From Butler Hospital.

First Photos:
Howard in Rio.
Grandpa’s Coat by Day;
Wig & Mom's Dress
For Carnival.

HPL Signs On
For Reality Show:
“The Whateleys”
Won’t Talk
About Howard’s
Attic Room-Mate.

Teen Alert As Nuns
Seize Lovecraft Volumes:
Why Believing In Cthulhu
Means You’re
Not Catholic.

Death Watch After
Lovecraft Shocker:
My Thirty-Year Addiction
To C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁.
“This Quadrant of Pie
Is My Last.”

Keziah's Geometry Lessons

from the world of H.P. Lovecraft's "Dreams in the Witch House"

“Something’s not right
about Keziah.”
So spoke the tutor
old Mason,
the defrocked minister
hired for his
only daughter’s lessons
in Latin and Greek,
geometry and music.

The old man sighed.
Five tutors had fled
at the sight of his hideous daughter.
This one had stayed
three months —- the record.
She labored him, not her, her,
in Latin; her Greek,
the tutor felt,
was somehow pre-Homeric,
littered with words not in
his Hellenic lexicon.

“Is it the Greek again?
She’s stubborn.”

The tutor — his name was William —-
waved his thin hand,
which seemed thinner
if that was possible,
than when he arrived.
(He had been eating
noticeably less at table
since moving his lodgings
to the upper garret).

“No, the geometry.
The things she says,
although she knows her Euclid,
are troubling me. She draws,
first squares, then cubes,
then hints at something
unrepresentable —-
a cube cubed
or transcended,
each of its six facets
exploded
to fifty-four invisible forms —-
yet only visible, she says
by standing outside
and seeing from above.

‘The cube I draw,’
she tells me
‘is but a mouse-hole
to the higher space.
Can ye not see there?’ ”

“Is she mad,
do you think,
or a kind of genius?”
the father muses.

“She lacks constraint,”
the tutor speculates.
“It’s not the way
a young woman thinks.”
He pauses.
“Or a Christian.”

“Indulge her,”
old Mason tells him,
“for neither cross
nor catechism
can come near her.
She will not leave this house
till I can marry her
to some doddering scholar
or ship captain derelict,
someone who will find her
amusing, her dowry
adequate, so long
as he expects no peace,
or children.”

The tutor gleans
at last, some sense
of Mason’s burden, the why
of his abandonment
of Bible and congregants.
Keziah was God’s
affliction for his own
pride of intellect,
a strident mind
in a hunch-dwarf body,
his penance
to be her keeper.

The tutor withdrew,
prepared for bed,
washed himself everywhere,
lay naked
the better to attract
his guilty pleasure,
his imaginary lover
by whose graces
he no longer need commit
the sin of self-pollution,

to await its coming,
to please its inquisitive,
pulsating and thrusting
machinery,
when it arrived,
not through the door
or window,
but from the crazed-angle corner
he filled with plaster
to unsquare it
and through whose polyhedrous
mouse hole
it came
a congeries of bubble-forms
to a geometer
as fair as Helen
before even Menelaus
took her, let alone
Trojan Paris,

with whom he flew
rhapsode ecstatic,
feeding and fed upon,
sung to and singing,
his Bible too,
unopened for weeks now,
turned down in the corner;

April’s end his own end
as she witch-waltzes
him to a Greek Walpurgis
he neither expects
nor wishes to survive.

His climax-death
will span eons and galaxies,
feelers and tentacles a-quiver,
hydrofluoric neurons
in orgasmic tremor,
worlds colliding, orbits
asunder, seismic,
ichthyc, arachnid,
reptilian pleasuring.
Keziah likes him.
And whom Keziah loves,
she shares with her gods.

A New H.P. Lovecraft-Related Poem

KEZIAH MASON

After H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” (1932)

“Something’s not right
about Keziah,”
the midwife tells
the scholar father,
Pastor Mason,
the Salem Divine.

The doting mother
won’t hear of it.
“Bad auspices,” the father nods.
“I told you so.”

The mother cradles it
as midwife scurries off
with rags and the bloody
umbilical,
an accusing serpent.
“Baby Keziah,” the mother croons,
“my perfect child.”

“Not right, bad auspices,
bad numerology,
too many vowels,
bad luck to have alpha
follow zed that way.”

She waves him away.
Anxious, he follows
the weary midwife,
Old Goodie Brown.
Their eyes meet.
“Tell me, “ he asks.
“Why didn’t you say
if I have a son or daughter?”

“Neither,” she says.
“Who knows,” she shrugs,
“what it will grow to?”

“Deformed?” he guesses.

She shakes her head.

“Hermaphrodite?”

Her eyes avoid him.

“The ancients write
of such creatures.”

The midwife hesitates,
taking the small purse
he discreetly offers.
“I’ve seen odd things,
good Pastor Mason,
but never this:
not male, not female.
What’s there,
I’d call machinery,
and what use God
or the Devil intends for it
I’ll not be thinking on.”

She hurries out
into the snowstorm,
the bloodied rag
held tight,
not one but two
umbilicals,
a black-furred thing
whose razor teeth
gnaw and consume
the after-birth.

“There, there,” she coos,
petting its fur,
as a tiny facsimile
of the Pastor’s face
stares up at her.
“Old Goodie Brown
will look out
for her little Jenkin,
my perfect child.”

Then the thing cleared
its tiny throat
and after a dry
and preliminary chittering
it thanked her
in fourteen languages.