With elegant restraint and electric imagery, Frannie Lindsay writes about the devotion that binds together a family in pain. When love is absent, how does caretaking erode? How does it continue? Each poem in Lamb is a small quest for a right answer, and for a reconciliation between the speaker and her mother and father, and within her body. Throughout the poems, animals serve as expressions of vulnerability and mortality; they are “hapless objects” whose unconditional loyalty, free of familial obligation, teaches the necessary lessons about tenderness and atonement. By caring for animals and then her aging parents, the speaker ultimately releases herself, stepping away from the power her parents hold over her: not in forgiveness, but in a solemn declaration of freedom. Lamb is a deft and memorable portrait of girlhood and aging.
—2 Samuel 12:3
I raised my one ewe lamb
as a daughter, fed her
red clover, the last hearts
of my cabbage, offered
her inky lips my cup.
She rested her chin
on my neck at night, her hoofs
on my cloak, her breathing
the wind on the waves
of sleep’s pure waters.
Sleep: an animal’s word
for bless: hoof of her heart
to the hoof of my heart.
The dusk before her slaughter
we walked together, pauper
and kin, over the meadow.
I sang to her, then
I unstrung the rusted bell
from her collar.
Listen to “The Ewe Lamb,” “Thirty-Year Meditation on an Act of Violence,” “Mother Leaving, 1965,” “Summoning the Whippoorwills,” “Something He Did,” “The Chores,” “Receiving the Host,” and “Walking an Old Woman into the Sea,” read by Frannie Lindsay:
Runner-up for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets