So Says the Light

“So Says the Light” is a poem by Jesse Aviv Wolfsthal. This piece deftly mixes references to Jewish life with allusions to Homer’s Iliad. Our editors were moved by Jesse’s nuanced reflection of the Jewish diaspora experience. 

I look upon the face of something familiar

and I know what it is to be Hector’s infant son,

afraid of his own father’s face, concealed by

bloody bronze made fearsome and cruel.

When I leave the house in the morning

I grow quieter than I was the previous night.

Humming to a Hamsa that hangs above me

as I cook for my family,

kissing a Mezuzah that calms me as I enter my bedroom.

When I leave the house in the morning

I am quieter than I was last night,

quieter than I was while singing along to

Ofra Haza with my brother, dissolving into laughter.

Quieter than I was while barking

at my mother, tazvi oti, leave me alone.

I look around I try to feel patriotic.

I look around and I try to feel

connection to the country I grew up in.

(All my growing happened somewhere else.)

I feel an uneasy weight on my tongue

a dull reminder that I am speaking the wrong language.

I taste blood.

I look upon friends and teachers

and I know what it is to be Hector’s infant son,

afraid of his own father’s face, concealed by

bloody bronze made fearsome and cruel.

(War renders the familiar unrecognisable.)

I speak the language (the language

doesn’t speak to me).

I am still afraid

of my neighbours’ familiar faces.

EDITORS’ NOTE:

Here is the original Iliad verse featuring Hector’s son, from the end of Book VI, in Lattimore’s 1951 translation:

“For you it will be yet a fresh grief, to be widowed of such a man who could fight off the day of your slavery. But may I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before I hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.”

Hector to his wife, Andromache (Iliad VI 462-465)

“So speaking, glorious Hector held out his arms to his baby,/ who shrank back to his fair-girdled nurse’s bosom / screaming, and frightened at the aspect of his own father,/ terrified as he saw the bronze and the crest with its horse-hair, / nodding dreadfully, as he thought, from the peak of the helmet.”

Iliad VI 466-470