For thirty-one years, my mother tried not to miss her. Every week,
a little water or the trickle of a few ice cubes
dropped
in black earth. Years back, in the muck of Toronto, April,
my grandmother visited from Israel, left
a Christmas cactus
the vast beach of my mother’s Mediterranean
mother — oranges, mangoes, brown skin, hot
tempers, a bowl of warm milk for stray cats —
all packed inside this
tiny hammered copper vessel. For fifteen years after
my grandmother’s death, this house plant
kept moulting, blooming. Blooming, moulting, against the grain of North
American weather. Sometimes I caught my mother, comfortable
inside unfamiliar Canada, cheek pressed up against perennial
creeping stems, channelling her mother’s nature, enduring as intermittent
pink florets.
My mother noted its growing, shrivelling. She would pick
dead leaves, sometimes forget
water. It survived,
the care it was given. This plant. For thirty-one years, my mother
kept showing me.
Grief, familial love, and the dislocation of the immigrant experience collide with one another.
- This poem requires careful reading because some of the contextual information is deliberately revealed to the reader (or listener) in gradual stages. For example, it is not until line 5 of the poem that the “her” in line 1 is revealed to be the speaker’s grandmother. How might you change your volume, tone, pitch, and intensity throughout a recitation to help the listener follow the poem’s narrative?
- The poem’s title refers to the Christmas cactus that the grandmother gave the mother while visiting Toronto from Israel. What else might the word “perennial” refer to in the context of the poem?
- This poem is in part a sensitive portrayal of the mother’s longing for the country she has left behind. Are there people in your family, or your circle of friends, who have experienced a similar challenge? Do you feel that immigration is always a loss for those who leave? What other feelings might be part of this complex experience?
- The sentence structure of this poem is sometimes, at first, challenging to follow. Consider the sentence that begins in stanza 2 with “Years back, in the muck of Toronto” and ends in stanza 4 with “tiny hammered copper vessel.” What is it that is “all packed inside this// tiny hammered copper vessel”? Why do you think the author used such complicated grammar here—what is its effect on the poem and on you as a reader?
- The images in the poem centre around the mother’s persistent clinging to memories of the grandmother, her absence and then loss. Do you think the speaker is accepting or resentful of the mother’s enduring grief? How would you feel in a similar situation?
Writing activity: Choose a physical object that is symbolic of someone you know and care about – say your older brother’s bicycle or your best friend’s backpack. Then, using this object as a metaphor for them, write an ode that celebrates who they are. Alternatively, you could write about someone you care about who has died, and, using the same method, write an elegy—a poem of sorrow, grief, and lamentation, usually for someone who has died—for them.
Useful Links
A Review of Tamar Rubin's Tablet Fragments: https://arcpoetry.ca/editorials/michael-greenstein-on-tablet-fragments-by-tamar-rubin/
Read Tamar Rubin's "When the Moving Truck Pulled Up": https://vallum.wordpress.com/2019/02/11/vallum-poem-of-the-week-when-the-moving-truck-pulled-up-by-tamar-rubin/
Tamar Rubin, “Perennial,” from Tablet Fragments. Signature Editions, 2020. © 2020 by Tamar Rubin. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.