Two Poems: Jean Nordhaus
The Promised Land
In the end, it was such a small country, just a place he happened to pass on his wanderings and felt himself born to
as when, walking a strange street on a cold night, you glimpse a lit room you mistake for your spirit’s true home.
And, really, it wasn’t much: a few date palms, a pool of clear water, a hillock— It’s just that something holy may once have set foot there,
and that it took so long to get back and that in the annals of exile, the exiles are long and the homecomings short—the joyous arrivals
surrendering all too soon to the old irritations and rivalries. Just that a mercurial deity may once have made too many promises.
To a child, adulthood is the promised land. To the invalid, a sturdy heart. To the hungry, a bowl of rice, a plate of greens.
The promised land can be a letter, an email, a continent, a cherished face, a small house with the mortgage paid.
For Isaac Babel
When they came for you in the coldest hour, when the witnessing stars contracted to ice in their sockets and the knock came as you knew it would, you rose and dressed with care, pocketed your wallet and keys without haste, your notebook and pen, accessories of selfhood you would soon no longer need. You put on your leather jacket smoothed your hair and topped it with the woolen cap you always wore to show they could not unsettle you. And when they thrust you into the car and you joked they must not get much sleep in their line of work, it was still you, who spoke. When later you confessed to the crimes they invented for you, that was only racked flesh speaking.
And while they bent over your strung frame you slipped away in the words of your stories to live as yourself in the safe-house of language.