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II.
Isaac
Youthful I was and trusting
and strong of limb,
The fresh-split firewood roped tight to
my back,
And I bore unknowing that morning my funeral
pyre.
My father, face averted, carried the flame,
And, in its scabbard, the
ritual blade he bore.
It seemed to me at the time a wearisome
trek.
I thought of my mother, how, in her age,
the Lord
Had blessed her among women, giving her
me
As joke and token both, unlikelihood
Being his way. But where, where from our
herd
Was the sacrifice, I asked my father. He,
In a spasm of agony, bound me hand and foot.
I thought, I am poured out
like water, like wax
My heart is melted in the midst of bowels.
Both were tear-blinded. Hate and love and
fear
Wrestled to ruin us, savage us beyond cure.
And the fine blade gleamed
with the fury of live coals
Where we had reared an altar among the rocks.
Peace be to us both, to father Abraham,
To me, elected the shorn stunned lamb of
God
We were sentenced and reprieved
by the same Voice
And to all our seed, by this terror sanctified,
To be numbered even as the stars at the
small price
Of an old scapegoated and thicket-baffled
ram.
- Anthony Hecht
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