April 5: Exile’s Child by D. Nurkse
D. Nurkse’s personal and cultural vision of the relation between fathers and sons informs his latest volume, The Border Kingdom, which also includes some significant additions to the growing canon of post-9/11 poems by American poets.
Exile’s Child
I asked my father
permission to kill a fly.
I came back and asked
—could I kill another?
He thought for a while
and said—No. Evening was taking
the sting off a family outing.
Along the beach, cousins
were charring meat. The waves
were turning an intense No-color.
I asked, was he in combat
in the old country? He said—No.
Then I was enraged at him,
feeling he was asleep, like the sand,
like the striped umbrella whose shadow
fell at right angles to night,
like my serious brother toting sums
in a leather-bound ledger. The flies alone
were awake, and their drone,
fainter than surf, was audible
only when I knelt and held my breath
stock-still by the banked coals.
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