Poem of the Week

Meditation at the End of December

Issam Zineh

I’d like to know who they are that rename this place on every visit.

Seasonal anthologizers that quale the whiteness of the columbine.

That black Ahab. Eastern the red and red the cedar.

One the word. The juniper. The last glacial sheets.

We were there a few years back to hear the laureate talk about the American poetic imagination.

Not there there in the sense of me and you sitting next to each other. But there.

Now.

I’m on the other coast. Reading about early Massachusetts genius.

Merry Christmas and love as a sort of political obligation

I am more than willing to hurt someone for.

A sort of as in some way inexact but sufficient or as in

that space in which my mind fills itself with an orgy of gods.

Something extraordinary has happened on this dull earth.

I wanted to kill myself twice this year. Then I remembered what you said:

the snow could not

presage the war. Then I saw a cow in a field.

The Yale Review · "Meditation at the End of December" by Issam Zineh

How did this poem begin for you?

The poem first came in December 2021. I was visiting family on Cape Cod, a place where I lived during important years of my life and consider a spiritual home. I feel an indigenous spirit there. I likewise can’t help but feel its colonial history. It’s also where I met Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and that whole crew. At the tail end of that December, I was walking a sandy trail of coarse grasses and red cedar that leads to a very quiet stretch of beach on the bay side of the lower Cape. I can’t remember if I pointed out some juniper berries to one of my daughters or she did to me, but that act of noticing and sharing set my mind on this discursive path that, I guess, conflated many of the preoccupations that were incubated in that place: indigeneity, multiplicities of language, literary tradition, love, alienation.

Issam Zineh is a poet, editor, and public health worker. He is author of Unceded Land, a Trio House Press Editors’ Selection and finalist for the Housatonic Book Award and Balcones Prize for Poetry. He lives on Paskestikweya land.