The Blessing

Absurd to think she read my poem
or story, heard my song, or watched
my video. I was told she could barely
sit upright by the end, or see,
let alone understand. Yet somehow
I recall an endlessly disappointed
and frightened voice complaining that my hero
resembled no one in the family,
that the girl wasn’t nice, the villains
unlike pogromchiks, whom I had let go
again unpunished. That metaphor
was not what she knew as language, even
in America. That my colors
weren’t those she could see from corners
where her chair docked for the day,
or had seen in airshafts. That the music
was loud, the picture on the television
bad. As I say, it’s absurd to imagine
she would have looked, or that I
would have asked, or that she somehow turned,
still querulous and weeping,
to join her stream of complaint
to a deeper mourning
from distant, scattered figures who
had nothing, but nonetheless hurried
forward at her pained gesture to give what they could.

—Frederick Pollack