The Tradition
Winner of the 2023 Northwest Review Poetry Prize
- I know—it’s only my wishing.
- My furious wishing, blind
- as the light itself—
- that we all could see,
- in the wide mouth of the raised voice,
- in the shaking of the raised fist,
- in the sightless
- beam of the glaring
- eye or the searing flame of the pointed
- finger…the terrified hiding,
- the helplessness, and the lie.
- My mother—
- born to wanderers fleeing the blood
- storms sweeping an empire to the east,
- swaddled nursed
- gowned in blame’s linens,
- wrapped woven and stitched snug
- into an unearned inheritance
- of bitterness—
- she’d learn to live
- in her husband’s cold city bravely enough
- by her stabbing wit. We’d stand indicted,
- new charges by the minute.
- Hadn’t we
- broken the China cup or the promise
- on purpose? Weren’t we the selfish ones
- walking in late,
- the chicken and rice
- cooled on the waiting plate? Who’d argue?
- We’d wear our long strings of sentences
- like many-looped
- necklaces. They’d clink
- against our bowls of tepid soup. Father,
- brother, and I, all bearing the ancient
- shames—
- hadn’t Abraham raised
- the blade over Isaac? Hadn’t we all
- somewhere been slaves? And what was it
- for which we were all
- to be hated?
- My father seemed to work the curse off
- with his endless efforts at earning. I took
- the example to heart, but also
- fought it—
- what was my crime? Meanwhile my brother
- kept quiet, the tradition alive
- and singing
- out of his dutiful silence.
- Wouldn’t his having swallowed the wound
- in our mother’s seasonless soup
- make him as righteous
- as she was?
- I grew more plagued with my own disputes
- and refusals. Who’d ever been pure
- victim?
- She was, she was sure.
- This morning, I’m thinking, the loved ones
- in Gaza, dead, whichever side fired
- the missile—
- the hand of the war.
- And hasn’t every last family fed
- on murder’s flatbread, keeping us blind
- as the light that lands
- on the rubble, all
- in miraculous unassuming brightness
- the kid decapitated, hospital hit,
- the fury symmetrically righteous,
- no one
- sorry for what they did? I stood by
- my shrunken mother at my father’s grave,
- and she swore,
- he ruined everything.