Sacrificial Cycle

​by Philip Fried


​

​​
​1. Abraham

Through the ages, I'm continually on the verge
of sacrificing my son at my God's command
until at the instant of pardon — sure to come? --
He interposes the innocent ram. Again

and again. I'm tired of being Abraham
whose mind races while his body performs
the enforced proffer of dear Isaac's blood.
Races ... in hypnotic gaps between the words. 

That is to say, words that stay in place
seem more like islands, so even the Elohim
they continue to affirm is lured to gaze
​at a surrounding sea of white silence.

​
2. Isaac

Father loves me, so Elohim must love
me, I'm continually repeating to
myself as we climb the mountain. To obey
means discovering my rightful place

among the men, beneath the deity.
Father's so inward and quiet, but I'm alive
to every leaf trembling in the breeze
and that marvelous ram father will later see.

But in the back of my mind, I know we're bound
for that stony altar where I'll be offered up
again for burning before I'm saved, and again
I'm trembling for that wholly innocent ram. 


3. The Ram
​
It looks like I'm the only one in the story
familiar with the higher criticism
and whose mind is chewing on textual variants
as his rear teeth are grinding vegetation.

I suspect they don't know, although they're on edge,
that we're all actors in an eternal recurrence,
and that it's always their nature to sacrifice
the most percipient and the true yea-sayer.


4. The Book

I never guessed that my front and back covers
​were the two brackets of a parenthesis
holding all the contents in suspension;
even after being carefully pared

down to the canonical, excluding
odd candidates as merely the would-be sacred,
and still hundreds and hundreds of pages long,
am I just a holy wish, a held breath?

​

Philip Fried's latest book of poetry, to be and not to be, will be published this fall by Salmon Poetry, Ireland.