#evening #poem

Good Night

“A Doe Replaces Iphigenia on the Sacrificial Altar”

BY ROBYN SCHIFF

“There was a need

to be weak and I met

it. I appeared in the confusion

between strength and

surrender, as if out of nowhere,

that’s the illusion.

I was reared

ruminating

in a thicket of

sorrow with a beautiful

string of drool

hanging out the side of my

mouth like a loose

phosphorescent

tether.

How will I know

what to do, I wondered.

No one does, my mother said.

And then, as the drawing back of the ocean

before a tsunami

suddenly exposes

outrageous fish on the seabed, gasping,

a great inhalation placed me

here panting on the sacred grass.

I feel like a girl in heaven,

but I am a beast in a clearing.

I came to

as the wind picked up

and in the bay

as the tide

came in,

what a blow to mankind,

an animalcrude wind

to war, toward

war, untoward

toward war

took my breath

away with it.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89515/a-doe-replaces-iphigenia-on-the-sacrificial-altar