This Maze Isn’t Heaven

Nomi Stone

My son pushes his tiny lawn-mower down the street
the week our state requires children

to learn how to use bleeding control stations. At night
I tell him the pit-pit-pit is thunder. How

can I tell him the darkness comes out of a person?
Our shadows fly each other like kites.

Ankle-deep in the marigolds, I spray him
with the hose as my wife weeds her lettuce, spinach, beets,

dill and mint. Oh Dallas, oh America. We cross
the ocean when we can

to my wife’s country with its dark, silent nights,
long days of shimmying on our bellies, collecting

mushrooms in the moss, as our dog sitter sends
alerts from his phone: person shot,

1.1 miles away. Vehicle stolen 300 feet away. We slip
the dried mushrooms into our suitcase,

whiffs of butter, leaves, dirt. Will you shame me,
Dallas, for leaving? Are you ashamed of what

I return to? On the playground, the casing
of a bullet. The daycare––the door is unlocked.

Our green path, flowers as tall as a boy, where
we saw the Coroner drive past. Even our own

street where this spring a bullet landed inside
another child’s body. Across the street

is Jimmy who keeps voting against our lives.
But we walk right over, carrying the mushrooms

we foraged: fruity, smelling of earth. Then, arms still full,
to our neighbor Sarah, whose daughter jumps on the trampoline

with our son. To Kim, who leaves us bags of baby clothes
and macaroni and cheese and Shilyh, who picked us up

at the airport. And Jimmy: milk-pale and ill
at the door, behind him the drum of a talk show,

telling him who to hate. But when he sees us, he hands us
Hershey bars—“Will you come over tomorrow, girls?”

You can become a person to someone else, can’t you,
and be less lonely? This maze

isn’t Heaven, but here is our way through it. It’s spring
and it’s Passover, so we invite everyone for dinner on our porch.

Annie and I rewrite the freedom story about our people
we’d read aloud every year as children,

to tell a bigger story with absolutely everyone in it.
It’s true: the world is not the one

we wanted. Still, each time we do the hand washing ritual,
we try to become someone new

to not return to where we started. My love
roasts lamb and carrots, adds

the inky forest into the broth. Shilyh brings her ukulele.
I lay poems around the table.

Our child climbs from lap to lap. Every time a song ends,
he yells out: “More singing!”

About this poem

First published in 2023.

This poem was commissioned by The Poetry Society for Japan Institute of Portland Japanese Garden’s international Peace Symposia. The Poetry Society will commission emerging poets from each continent to write a new poem and perform it at each symposium from 2022 to 2024. This poem by Nomi Stone was premiered at the third symposium in New York City, USA, on 21 September 2023.

The poet will expand on the ideas in this poem and her relationship with Muriel Rukeyser’s work in the forthcoming hybrid collection Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser (edited by Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim). Nomi says of this work, “I have been immersed in the writing of Muriel Rukeyser lately, and so when I was writing this poem I couldn’t help but think of her work. The third couplet in this poem quotes several words and is inspired by Rukeyser’s lines in ‘The Children’s Elegy’ (‘Where does the darkness lie? / It comes out of the person, says the child. / A shadow tied and alive, trying to be’) and also invokes her notion of the maze in her children’s book Mazes.’

Nomi Stone

Poet and anthropologist Nomi Stone is the author of three books, most recently the poetry collection Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019), finalist for the Julie Suk Award, and the ethnography Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire, gold medalist winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) (University of California Press, 2022). Of Pinelandia, Joseph Masco writes: “Nomi Stone maps the fantasies and poetics supporting US militarism today—an astonishingly original book.” Carolyn Forché described Stone’s poetry collection Kill Class as “a rare achievement” and in The Massachusetts Review, the book was described as “part of a new generation of writers who hold American readers firmly within the scope of blame and reckoning, much as Denise Levertov did during the Vietnam War.” Winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright, Stone’s poems recently appear in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, POETRY Magazine, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and widely elsewhere. She was most recently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Anthropology at Princeton and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas.