Looking through sound at my grandson
before he is born, the spine in the darkness,
the small white heart beating. Then
I saw them lift him to the world. Oh,
he has loved our horses, been my green branch.
Now he knows anger,
thicket, fire.
When I was a girl I sat on the rung of a ladder
and asked my father if he killed anyone during the war.
I remember the birds were singing and how
he, that gentle man, changed to anger, narrowing
eyes: Never ask that question again.
Oh the astonishing shadows
of men and women
in the light of a simple question.
When I saw the war, the burning children,
I wanted to hurt the killers. It is the way one metal
in the presence of a magnet becomes magnetic.
The god took away something from some of us
and the heart is the first thing to go.
Some days I think of that small unborn heart
plucked from the stem of infancy.
Some days I want to give myself
to no part of humanity, fallen from the ladder
so old now it has lost its rungs,
just two sticks of wood trying to walk.