Lineage, by Daniel Ginsburg

Lot and His Daughter, by Albrecht Altdorfer (Germany) 1537

Lineage

Lot’s firstborn cups her head.
Is the source of her anguish the backdrop?
Sodom burns, distant and uncentered,
a vermilion inferno.  Can she smell hair
igniting like torchwood?  Hear moaning?

Or does she contemplate her mother, a pillar
of salt?  Or feel her stomach, swollen
after only one night, as she witnesses

the foreground?  Wrinkled Lot lies with her younger sister
on a fertile green blanket.  Nude and buxom, she floats,
buttocks above his groin.  Lot gropes her, flask filled
with crimson wine, neck protruding.

Does a divine end – preservation of the bloodline –
justify the means?  Then what the moral framework of this world?​

Daniel Ginsburg

Daniel Ginsburg earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from American University.  His poetry has appeared in The Northern Virginia Review  and American Literary Magazine.  His poem “Black Snake Coiled In My Black Leather Sofa” is forthcoming in the 2020 issue of Gargoyle Magazine, and his poem “Multiplier” will appear in The American Journal of Poetry.  His English translations of Hebrew poetry by Israeli poet Shira Stav were published in Pleiades: Literature in Context.