Jessica Jacobs
In the Shadow of Babel
To run along the Hudson is to pass through ghosts
of the Meal Market, where grains were sold
beside Native and African captives. Then inland, weaving
between the skyscrapers of Wall Street, where
even in high summer alleys are shaded to night and cold
as snowmelt streams. Which makes it easy to believe
men-who-would-be-gods once built a tower
to rival the heavens, laid the foundation
while seaweed creped the remnants of redwoods
and dolphins rotted in mountain lakes—
the Flood not myth but memory,
their desire to build beyond drowning
sensible. Yet as one generation built
on the next, citizens were muscled
into one mold, indivisible, indistinguishable
as the clay bricks they passed from hand to hand
in that assembly line to the sky. And the whole earth
was of one language: However differently they felt it,
people had to speak their pain the same.
∞
But what does such pain mean to me
who runs with no one chasing her, with no one lying
in wait—to a woman running
simply because she wants to?
The past is a tower tall enough to pierce
time, transmit
all echoes, to continue
casting shadows.
∞
To the west, Manifest Destiny of corn-soy-cotton-wheat
displaces all that once grew there with uniform
grids of green and the need for labor to tend them—
the old whisk-away-the-tablecloth trick
done cruelly, so few people left standing.
Africans branded with their captors’ initials,
then again, with the surnames
of their buyers.
Native children dragged
from Sha’note, “wind blowing through,”
to Charlotte; Lone Bear
to Lon Brown.
Names that meant
nothing, in letters they couldn’t read.
To the east, Blut und Boden, Blood and Soil: a swastika
crossed by a sword and sheaf of wheat.
Jews issued I.D.s stamped with a red J
and new middle names:
Israel for men, Sarah for women. Then,
in the camps, shorn to nothing
but numbers.
Fleeing pogroms, vowing to send
for his wife and young son,
at Ellis Island, alone,
my great-grandfather immigrated
from Kudlanski to Goodman.
∞
Like plants smothered by a tarp to cleanse the land
for the one crop deemed desirable.
Like my grandparents’ Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew,
like the ancestors no one speaks of
massacred in a Polish synagogue, or in a pit in a forest
they were forced to dig themselves—many of them
farmers who knew what it was to dig, who knew
the good such work could bring.
Like their murders I know only from the archives.
Monoglot me, struggling to speak, to listen
to what, to who came before:
Generic American, protected
by my passing
as not Jewish, not queer;
so often oblivious.
Though Charlemagne said, To have another language,
is to possess a second soul,
to have the language of your home
is to possess the soul that is your own.
∞
As those enslaved were forced to speak
the colonists’ language—even that corner
of their minds colonized.
As Kill the Indian, Save
the Man meant severing
children from their homes, severing
their braids, forcing them into shoes and faith and words
that wouldn’t fit.
As Nazis burned sacred texts,
trying to bonfire the holy
tongue from Jews’ mouths.
As they were torn
from their parents
on auction blocks and reservations,
at borders and in selection lines—children,
those words we say to the future.
∞
With no child, with only English,
I feel severed from every time
but the present and question
what brings me, now, to speak:
Because a president praised
rabid men who chanted, Blood and soil,
chanted, Jews will not replace us, chanted
with their pink faces flushed and raging
in the flicker of tiki torches?
Because I finally know
the feeling that the country I was born in is mine
but not meant for me?
It took this fear to grow
my voice.
∞
Two-thirds of the world
now speaks English, every culture
bound. Without firebreak,
a single strain of hatred
can inflame the world.
Here, murders in synagogues,
in the homes of rabbis; beatings
in the streets. On the way to shul, Jews hide
yarmulkes under baseball caps, pry
mezuzahs from their doors.
Out for a jog, on a walk to the store, in the car
with their kids, in their own backyards and beds,
Black men and women, Black children, murdered
by those paid to protect them,
by those who forced
Water Protectors into dog kennels at Standing Rock
after scrawling arrest numbers on their arms.
∞
America—always
a grander city, always a more
towering tower
built on land
stolen from those who listened to it
well enough to know
when dogwood leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear,
sow corn. When lilacs bloom, seed the beans
whose roots will feed the cornstalks that support them.
And once those purples fade, plant squash: a sprawl
of broad green ground cover. Each plant providing
what the other requires.
At Babel, God said,
“Let us נָבְלָ֥ה navlah their language”—“to confound”
but also “to intermingle.”
Let the world tell us
what the world needs and when.
∞
While the nights are still cold
in my new mountain home, my wife and I
join our neighbors to ready the ground
with pickaxe and spade, to jostle
rocks from their strangle of roots
and turn the dirt with the rich heat of humus
grown from the scraps of our tables and yards;
we water the starts and tuck them gently
in the soil.
And during the summer harvest,
in this garden open
to all who want to work there,
the light so late shadows
grow weary of waiting and slink off
to sleep in corners—with hands heavy
from hauling, lifelines burnished
by soil—we give thanks
for all we’ll share, and when the feasting
is through, recite נְפָוֹשׁת וֹבּרֵא Borei Nefashot:
a blessing for God
who created many souls
and their deficiencies.
Complete, we’d have no reason
to speak, to ask, to reach out
our hands. To seek faces and lives
different than our own.
And here we are, together, mouths full
of words for our hunger and need.
Perfectly imperfect, each of us
is a new way of saying.
Laurel Anderson
Lauren Camp
Tina Cane
Willa Carroll
Charles K. Carter
Donna Castañeda
T. Clear
Barbara Daniels
Merridawn Duckler
Denise Duhamel
Cal Freeman
Majda Gama
zakia henderson-brown
Jessica Jacobs
Elizabeth Kuelbs
Michael Lauchlan
Tamara J. Madison
Jennifer Martelli
Abby Minor
Trevor Moffa
Caridad Moro-Gronlier
Stephanie Niu
Katherine Page
Iain Haley Pollock
Hannah Rodabaugh
Michael Rogner
Adrie Rose
Carole Symer
Carolyne Wright
