Ellen Steinbaum
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Ellen Steinbaum is a poet and journalist. Her new book, Container Gardening, is a collection of poems about what is perishable, what endures, and what makes us who we are. She is also the author of the collection, Afterwords, and of a one-person play, CenterPiece. She writes a literary column for The Boston Globe.
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Distant Relation
A woman in Brazil may
or may not be my cousin,
sends photographs would I please
see if anyone looks familiar
and there
on my screen on my desk
the Atlantic City beach bright behind them,
the tsar and his war decades in the past:
my grandparents,
looking at someone from Brazil
who holds a camera. A hemisphere away
the maybe cousin brings
fruit compote to
a family dinner, and
given the way things work,
the way that dust motes
float from place to place,
drift down around the world,
the silt on my spring windowsill
may have been in Montana just last month
or on a Chinese breeze a century ago
flown from the Sahara Kalahari
Minsk or Mainz or Patagonia in
the Middle Ages and
on some yet-to-be-imagined street
may brush the cheek of my
great-great-grandchild
or of someone in Brazil
taking a picture at the beach.
Petition
My daughters know anything can happen.
Holding their babies close, they tell me
stories they have heard: neighbor children
burned in their colorful beds, struck down in
driveways by their parents’ shining cars, or,
from far away, other unthinkable shrugging-off
the trifling weight of their only lives:
murdered by marauders while tending goats,
caught between bullets on an unblessed street.
And it does not end, of course, as the mothers
of soldiers always know; the everpresent
scythe is sharp to cut down what we love.
I have no wisdom here, no rights, no hard experience
gained through famine or bad luck.
My ancestors were loath to tempt
the evil eye. Poo, poo, poo, they spat,
refused to praise too much lest the angel
of death covet their prize, knowing all the while
the ruse had doubtful value. I desperately
rejoice at minor colds, small naughtiness.
No, we have no perfection here--see
this tiny blemish, this one is a picky eater,
that one sleeps poorly, pouts sometimes.
No jewels for your crown here, dark angel.
Not one is unflawed: pass them by.
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