History shows
a woman crouched by the river
with her two boys, breadcrumbs
in their palms, half a dozen goslings
drawing near and pulling back,
torn between hunger and fear.
Later, the woman sits in a room
alone, the children asleep,
her husband working nights
or maybe she’s raising the boys
without their father. She no longer
hears the traffic on the avenue,
the occasional late dog walker
or the couple talking in low voices
outside her first floor window.
She may have a notebook open
or a book in which she reads
Say the word history: I see
your mother, mine.
Or she’s threaded a needle, laid out
a few yards of fabric that caught her eye
in a shop window. Maybe she sits
at an upright piano her mother played,
or sits with her memories, their colors
lit from within like stained glass
when you walk past a church during
the evening service. It’s been a long year
for all of them, closed-in, too close
together inside these few rooms.
Her grandchildren will ask her about
this year of plague and angers, how
she lived through it, and she’ll tell them
about the goslings, their soft down, the way
they stretched their necks toward the bread
that her boys, their fathers, were offering.
after Eavan Boland
Susanna Lang divides her time between Chicago and Uzès, France. The 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from December Magazine, her most recent chapbook, Like This, was released in 2023 (Unsolicited Books), along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). Her third full-length collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was published in 2017 (Terrapin Books). Her work appears in such publications as The Common, Asymptote, American Life in Poetry, Mayday, Rhino Reviews and The Slowdown.