Glossolalia

My baby brandishes a wooden knife
meant to halve a wooden shallot

as he hollers his newest word. Knife.
Look at my son, flashing

his dagger, jamming it into plush
animals. Knife, knife. Look at him,

oblivious to the weapons
littering his lineage or, God forbid,

possessed by them. Can the babies
planted in the dirt of our bodies

absorb the torments buried there?
My gentle, watchful child

wants all the knives. But some days,
everywhere, blue. The bear, blue.

The bells, blue, the car, the cup,
the light. I marvel at my son,

who marvels at the sky—blue, blue—
no matter how gray the bully of clouds.

And this is all I want.
Look at my son laughing at the rain.

Look how he prods the window
with his knife, insisting

we cut up the storm, demanding 
the blue back into view.

Copyright © 2022 by Eugenia Leigh. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 17, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I wrote this poem from a place of fear—the fear of passing down my past, its traumas, to my child. What surprised me was that while I believed I was trying to express these anxieties, the poem showed me that I was actually asking for something. Hope, perhaps. A healed future. A child more resilient than I. When another poet suggested the title ‘Glossolalia,’ it occurred to me that as I wrote this poem, my spirit must have been praying.”
—Eugenia Leigh