
Photo by Pontus Wellgraf on Unsplash
Poem: “She Is”
My grandmother is a limestone temple;
she is a titanium rod, she is an iron lung.
She is not just flesh and blood that will wilt and blacken
over fire, she is the flames;
Tall and hot, dancing in every color,
and impossible to contain. She is the lightning strike
and the brimstone, she is the forget-me-nots
scattered across the prairie. She wrestles with God
and his entire misguided army. She is mistaken for smoke
rising over the treetops when she is really the clouds
that have been there since sunrise.
She is not a star hung on a silver chain
or pinned to a lapel, she is the full moon.
God looked back at Adam and hung his head
after he watched her spin her own self out of heaps
of ashes on the floor; For she is not unclean or untouchable,
she is the lamb for the sake of creation,
she is an emblem of the resilience of her people.
She is not a pilgrim, she is not tied to a holy land
or cursed to wander, she is the soil.
She beckoned Israel to her bones,
and though she lies in Israel today,
she is, she is, she is.
Poetry Editor Alicia Ostriker comments:
This extravagant, hyperbole-filled poem is not merely a tribute to the poet’s grandmother. It is a litany of reversals and expansions of conventional meaning, making grandmother not just a great life force but one who can wrestle with God, and be a phoenix risen from death, and even become a promised land in her own right.