Daniel Borzutzky: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Or (For Isaac)

And he took his father to the flame and his father said

I am not a goat

And the boy said   no    you are not a goat

And the father said     where are the goats

And the boy said    you are a goat today or you will be a goat

The father thought about hybrid beasts and said nothing

He looked with love at the strange child he created

He thought about how hard it had been to keep the boy alive

And when the boy led him down the death path he kept thinking

I should be in charge   

But I am tired and I can’t do anything to gain control

I am crinkled, worn out, sick of seeing

Things get destroyed in my name

Do I mind that I might be turned into someone else’s burden?

Also, I admire my son’s determination

Someone, the voice of X, told him to take me to the flame

Someone serious, a credible character,

Told him to take me to the flame

It would have been perfectly reasonable to resist

To say look, son, this is not the kind of thing you should do to your father

But I was tired and the child was persistent and I wondered

How long will this thing go on?

It’s true, I am old now

I don’t actually want to live that much longer

But there are a few more things I have to do

Is it presumptuous to say there is a future that depends on me?

The earth has its own ideas

The sea has other ideas

And the sky has ideas

There are just a few bodies falling from the sky today

I think I recognize some of them

They are my children and one of them whispers to me

This is not the right way to live

And to live in the wrong way is to die in the wrong way

Who said that and what did they mean?

Before he takes me to the flame I tell my son

There is nothing left to do here on earth

I welcome the pain and I welcome my son’s audacity

I admire his fingers as they grip my shirt sleeve

In those fingers I feel sadness, tenacity, anger, hope

I feel the violence of the centuries filling up in his blood

I know how lonely it is in his body

The expectations of our people are extraordinary

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Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024) and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún. [This poem originally appeared in The Atlantic, Feb. 2025.]

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                        Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562, oil-on-panel (46 inches by 64 inches).

Comments

[Joanna Sit]

Masterful.

[Indran J Amirthanayagam]

This cuts close. How often do we think about whom we have sired, and forget to ponder on how the sired, or Oedipus, must fulfill too his side of the infernal bargain? Muchas gracias Daniel. Un poema fuertisimo. Indran Amirthanayagam (Seer, Hanging Loose Press, 2024)

[Grace Cavalieri]

I am moved to tears with this poem.

[Linda Hickman]

This comes at a time in my own life experience where I can totally relate to this. Thank you.

[Sr. Leslie]

Daniel certainly has a lot of depth…This is a powerful prayer….What comes to mind are the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel: “In the beginning was the relationship.”…Thank you Daniel and thank you Terence…

[David Beaudouin]

This is a tough but necessary poem to embrace at any age. The declarative stomp of each line, just like time, leads us to the ultimate mystery wrapped in the "extraordinary." Thank you, Daniel and Terence!

[Amy Gerstler]

This poem caused tears to spring from my eyes. Amazing.

[Don Berger]

Goodness Terence, you've done it again, yourself taking us to the flame by showing us a colossal poem, whose maker also takes us to the same enormous flame. A ultra-powerful mix of Russell Edson, the King James Bible, and whatever excellent else, Daniel's poem changed this Sunday for me and I'm sure a good bunch of other people. It's fresh, it's new, it's, to use a phrase from Ashbery's translation of Reverdy, "the whole force." I can't wait to read it again and again and then try to write in this vein in hopes that something big might happen. Thank you, the both of you!

[Eileen Reich]

Wonderful poem. It touched my heart

[Bob Holman]

Wow. Words. And then, no words.

[Terence Winch]

Thank you, Leslie

[Terence Winch]

Thanks for the comment, David.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

In his poem "Or (For Isaac)," Daniel Borzutzky seems to evoke the sentiment expressed in the line "The Child is father of the Man" in William Wordsworth's poem "My Heart Leaps Up" with the story in Genesis 22 where God tests the fealty of Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice his son Isaac in a burnt offering. God ultimately stops Abraham from killing Isaac, a near-act convincing God of Abraham's devotion. Abraham himself "thought about how hard it had been to keep the boy alive / And when the boy led him down the death path he kept thinking / I should be in charge." That is just one of the role reversals and the demands they place on father and son in Borzutzky's powerful poem. The final role reversal, delineated in the poem's last six lines, has the son intent on sacrificing his father, who feels "sadness, tenacity, anger, hope / I feel the violence of the centuries filling up in his blood / I know how lonely it is in his body." Those words by the father offer understanding and near-forgiveness for what is about to happen: patricide. Exploring complex emotions with uncommon fearlessness and stunning deftness, Borzutzky is a sui generis poet. It's another great pick, Terence, in an unwavering succession of them.

[Terence Winch]

Don: thanks for that comment.

[Terence Winch]

Earle: thank you!  Great comment.

[Cleo]

What a fantastic poem. Really felt:

"I should be in charge

But I am tired and I can’t do anything to gain control

I am crinkled, worn out, sick of seeing"

[Michael C Winch]

A goat wrote this

[Lynne Dreyer]

A goat definitely stopped the sacrifice. beautiful and intense poem.