Summer 2018
where you sat
iambicizing childhood, revolution, and the Terror,
I inhale the scent
of virtues you knew
would bloom
even when forgotten by the future
sitting in your garden
in a sweat-stained sleeveless dress
trying to come up with something to say —
flowers? clouds? loneliness? —
unable to make poetry,
unable to make sense
and unable to say nothing
as my country cages children
who may not survive the growing season.
No matter how many are caged or killed,
your garden’s short-lived citizens,
rosa mundi, apothecary rose, common valerian,
annually perform
their parable of resistance.
Die and blossom again.
No one expects them to rhyme
beauty with justice, stamens
with the fear
that’s coated my country like pollen
since the last election. People
are thrown in cages
and poets like me, alive and afraid, conscious
and unconscious, singular
and symptomatic,
scan heaven and earth
and beds of flowers
for an arc that bends toward justice
and something eloquent,
original, and vague —
something a flower might say —
that makes liberty sound inevitable and safe
and tyranny destined to pass away.
Poems aren’t keys
that unlock cages,
just strings of letters
on screens or pages
hoping some future
will read them and remember
that somewhere there was a garden
and somewhere there still is,
inexcusably rhyming
beauty with existence
in a language that has no words
for justice or injustice,
complicity or cages.
In pastel plosives; violet vowels;
half-blown roses’
luminous consonance.
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Joy Ladin is the author of ten books of poetry, including 2022's Shekhinah Speaks, National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna, Headmistress Press's gorgeous edition of Fireworks in the Graveyard, and Lambda Literary Award finalists Impersonation and Transmigration. Her poems have appeared this year in a number of publications, including Liber: A Feminist Review, Sojourners, and two anthologies, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, and Queer Nature. She has also published a memoir of gender transition, Through the Door of Life, and a work of trans theology, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, among other honors.
