Her Winter Borscht
It was murder, much as love, drove them
west, pressed them off the loam
where their dead’s bones were left. Murder
in its dark red flamboyant cursive
wrote its recipe in those beds—charred
marrow, ash of prayer-book, hate-crushed
muscle, dread’s sour salts, what all
the roots could savor, what beets
and apples would absorb, what lambs
and goats would grind to milk and meat—
it took murder’s horseback swords
and torches just to sweep them off,
to leave the blossoms to the bees, the beet tops
to dusk’s rabbits and night’s voles.
Now it’s dawn, and blinking out my window
on the leafy greens we’ve nursed, the staked
tomatoes and sprawled zucchini stalks,
there’s a hint of her again, most soothing
scent in that bright kitchen where she builds
the broth, chops deep-red roots to matchsticks,
shreds the cabbage, hums a village
song…she is my senses’ tie to where
I’m from, the girl of four she was come
by foot, cart, ship’s deck to a smoking
riot of asylum, itself a stolen
garden, shackle-worked, gun-gated,
sharecropped, drilled and mined to stoke
its fired lungs. And this girl thrives,
heartbeat like mine will be, kill-quickened.
I see her at the butcher shop, hear that
endangered language on her lips. She knows
the lamb’s blessed before the neck’s slit, sure
each creature’s prayed-for as its blood’s let,
blade so fine it’s hardly felt. She trusts
the butcher hangs his painted apron
on its hook before the sun sets
on what they call here Friday night,
and that he then bows his head in praise of all
creation. Which does not set things right.
But will let my grandmother stir
her love in with the murder, brisket
in her sweet-and-sour winter-garden stew,
her lineage of wariness and hope consigned
to my insides. And I work on leaving
all the kill I can out of the root soup
I cook for my little ones—there,
the leaves shine in the new sun. I’ll go
wet those beds down while the light’s low.
Still, the murder gets into what’s grown
in this ground too. The roots all know.
[“Her Winter Borscht” first appeared in RHINO]