DECODING
The strangest thing about being
an adoptee is in deciphering
the code of your essence, where
deep within you the question
"Who am I" finds its answer.
These fingers are those of my
father's kindle, gnarled from work
in the begrudging soil outside Norwich,
where life was the fields and on Sunday
an attempt to curry God's favor.
These eyes are those of my mother,
and her family in the village
in Lithuania, where one smiled
on growing family, and the other
on the horrors that waited always
just over the horizon, the Jew
a waiting prey with no defense
save prayer to a God who seemed
too often distracted to intercede.
I am both of them and neither,
lost forever in a helical maze
without direction or map, save
a vague image in the morning mirror.
The strangest thing about being
an adoptee is in deciphering
the code of your essence, where
deep within you the question
"Who am I" finds its answer.
These fingers are those of my
father's kindle, gnarled from work
in the begrudging soil outside Norwich,
where life was the fields and on Sunday
an attempt to curry God's favor.
These eyes are those of my mother,
and her family in the village
in Lithuania, where one smiled
on growing family, and the other
on the horrors that waited always
just over the horizon, the Jew
a waiting prey with no defense
save prayer to a God who seemed
too often distracted to intercede.
I am both of them and neither,
lost forever in a helical maze
without direction or map, save
a vague image in the morning mirror.
Louis Faber is a poet residing in Port St. Lucie, Florida. His work has previously appeared in Atlanta Review, Arena Magazine (Australia), Exquisite Corpse, Rattle, Eureka Literary Magazine, Borderlands: the Texas Poetry Review, Midnight Mind, Pearl, Midstream, European Judaism, Greens Magazine, The Amethyst Review, Afterthoughts, The South Carolina Review and Worcester Review, among many others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.