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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).