Like the deer stag in my garden
who batters his head with his hind leg
to free himself from a huge poplar branch
caught in the great crown of his antlers —
Like one of the furies torn from ancient myth —
I drag the forest along behind me,
my dead crowded together in their massacre pit.
Like Isaac’s ram, I am caught
in the thicket, singing their names.
“Pursuit” previously appeared in Myra Sklarew’s “If You Want to Live Forever.”
Sklarew is professor emerita at American University and the author of “Lithuania: New & Selected Poems,” “Harmless,” “If You Want to Live Forever” and the forthcoming “A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust and the Construction of Memory”(SUNY Press).
