Susanna Lang

You say We carry our dead

on our backs
and you are right, though the dead do not all  

weigh the same—
our fathers are featherweight, they were ready 

to go on their way
while the children cling to us, they pull 

on our bones.
The girl, shot. The boy who stole arsenic.  

Years and years ago,
they still crook our spines. Now a voice 

calls from the unknown—
child resurrected as a man, a father  

with five children of his own.
He calls to say You saved my life, though  

he ran from us then.
And ran again. We walked and then drove  

in ever widening circles,
searching. What we hear in his words  

is that he lives.
We’d thought he was one we carried.

Susanna Lang’s e-chapbook, Among Other Stones: Conversations with Yves Bonnefoy, was released by Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics in June 2021, and her translation of Baalbek by Nohad Salameh was published in October 2021 by Atelier du Grand Tétras. Her third full-length collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was published in 2017 by Terrapin Books. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as Prairie Schooner, december, Delos, New Poetry in Translation, American Life in Poetry and The Slowdown. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, and she is now working with Souad Labbize on new translations. More information available at www.susannalang.com.