Amy Lowell Prize Co-Winner, selected by Dzvinia Orlowsky
“O Lord, We Are Aware of Our Iniquity and the Iniquity of Our Fathers”
Jeremiah 14-20
In this breathing dark we are the world walled
from birds that flew, detritus of feathers
and entrails now yielding no prophecy,
caught cattle floating bloated, bone-emptied,
slitherers even, cast from flat and ridge—
gone sinew bone blood pulse parted without
this hold where pitched and planked breath survives
what rounds now and towers under an ark
neither my hand steers nor keel steadies,
that looked in light of warning not so frail
as fear fears when streams river, every
hollow fountains, waters sealing heavens,
when, no prophet in a whirl of vision
but child behind locked door it is promised
will open where beyond rain or salt-rush
the moored unflagging tree silvers under
the arm of the sky bowed after fury,
when tides writhe, exhausted, released birds
fly home—when I, undoing yoke and cargo
of my charge, take flesh born on these waters,
take wood promise renews by this ark’s death
to sow a branching fire into washed air,
then, spanning the removed world, then fingered
to endure, will I, now mother–father,
root and stem, leaf branch soil wholly I,
sinew bone blood pulse that quelled winds assure
past flood, past fire, as seed turns fruit, mud brick,
will stand, even as promise quenches here
what flares where in darkness behind my face
I see the dead I am bound to ride out
of the erased realm turning salt to seed,
their blood my blood, a wine brine-embittered
raising the blotted world in flesh, in dream
of forbears whom suddenly not to have
is to want their hands to hold when vistas
compass the mind’s eye, their words to glow guides
in this seething, who now smear silt under judging waters—
will I then, riven, sick with second birth, when,
breath-greedy, the exiled dead send tendrils
tough as vine cords twining their sloughed sense still
seed-time to harvests these waters spawn, turn
from them in night’s comfort cradle, or toward?
Ellin Sarot’s poems have appeared in The Main Street Rag, The Paterson Literary Review, The Deronda Review, Women’s Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, and in several anthologies, including Women Writers Resist: Poets Resist Gender and Black Lives Have Always Mattered. In 2017, her poem “Raynaud’s Transit” was a Mass Poetry Poem of the Moment. She was the first recipient of the Gish Jen Fellowship for Emerging Writers by the Writers’ Room of Boston, where she later was a member of the board. Until this year for many years she volunteered at the Cambridge Public Library’s Literacy Project.