(1881-1941)
Grass swords browned at the hilts
drowned in fog. I come across their sharp points
as if a homing device had pointed me
here for the first time
and walk across that grass
where it can offend me. Cut by cut.
I wanted to see it for myself—huts, forests, the sound of rifle fire
round after round, what we heard in an alleyway
jump off the walls, when your daughter went back to fetch her boots
like coming here just to understand what cannot be
recovered. And again, turning to the earth.
Its fields of sunflowers
building light, mimicking the path
of the real sun,
the real swords, the real grass,
because this cannot be forever. The lifting of this fog
to show me clearly—hover over my failures.
I who was told nothing and could not imagine my parent’s silence
as the accompaniment to trauma. Walking toward the abandoned distillery
where you were forced to work,
I hear the ping of stone, there are ghosts here
released in the absence of bodily form.
The shattered, sticking into the ground, unsanctified
from someone’s high-tipped singing,
low-lying in a field, bear themselves sharply.
Harriet Levin is the author of The Christmas Show (Beacon Press) winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize and Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award; Girl in Cap and Gown (Mammoth Books) and My Oceanography (CavanKerry). Her debut novel, How Fast Can You Run (Harvard Square Editions) was excerpted in The Kenyon Review and profiled on NPR. Her writing has appeared in PEN America, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Iowa Review, The Harvard Review, Drunken Boat, and other journals. She holds a MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches creative writing at Drexel University.
