Prodigal (for Jahar Tsarnaev)
by Heather Nelson
A remarkable conjunction-
in dreams where a boy is lost
you are too,
on a freeway
far-afield,
bent on a six-o-clock
assignation with another
city, in a parallel April.
The week of the bombing
I dallied with Wordsworth
basked in Romantic shadow,
peered through digitized
keyholes, at the Gothic cast
apprehension shed upon
the gritty, the striving, the open
face of the Cambridge we’d left behind.
My son cowered
under the duvet,
under slate and stone,
as cameras raced down
his streets, past the schoolyard
past the rug store,
past huddled friends,
he cowered
under the tarp,
trapped by the river,
he cowered with you,
Jahar.
From London to Reykjavik,
and on into Boston,
my dreams were turbulent
full of certainty that I’d lost a boy,
but whose?
Which boys were safe,
lips slack with sleep,
pillows damp with hair
stuck to their cheeks?
Which boys were bleeding,
who was hidden,
which boys could I reach?
Back home the talk is
all of loss, vocal tremors,
everyone shaken, everyone looking
back over their shoulders
for a catch in time
when safe seemed possible.
Heather Nelson is a poet, teacher, mother, and recovering attorney based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She studied writing under the poet C.D. Wright as an undergraduate at Brown University. Most recently she has studied poetry with Tom Daley and Barbara Helfgott Hyett. Her work has appeared in Constellations and The Somerville Times.
by Heather Nelson
A remarkable conjunction-
in dreams where a boy is lost
you are too,
on a freeway
far-afield,
bent on a six-o-clock
assignation with another
city, in a parallel April.
The week of the bombing
I dallied with Wordsworth
basked in Romantic shadow,
peered through digitized
keyholes, at the Gothic cast
apprehension shed upon
the gritty, the striving, the open
face of the Cambridge we’d left behind.
My son cowered
under the duvet,
under slate and stone,
as cameras raced down
his streets, past the schoolyard
past the rug store,
past huddled friends,
he cowered
under the tarp,
trapped by the river,
he cowered with you,
Jahar.
From London to Reykjavik,
and on into Boston,
my dreams were turbulent
full of certainty that I’d lost a boy,
but whose?
Which boys were safe,
lips slack with sleep,
pillows damp with hair
stuck to their cheeks?
Which boys were bleeding,
who was hidden,
which boys could I reach?
Back home the talk is
all of loss, vocal tremors,
everyone shaken, everyone looking
back over their shoulders
for a catch in time
when safe seemed possible.
Heather Nelson is a poet, teacher, mother, and recovering attorney based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She studied writing under the poet C.D. Wright as an undergraduate at Brown University. Most recently she has studied poetry with Tom Daley and Barbara Helfgott Hyett. Her work has appeared in Constellations and The Somerville Times.
