Barbara Edelman: Lot’s Wife

“Arise, take thy wife and thy two daughters that are here; lest thou be swept away in the
iniquity of the city. Escape for thy life; look not behind thee,”

—Angels to Lot, Genesis: 19

.

“But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.”

.
I was drowsing through Sunday school
to Mrs. Schiff’s twang, dreaming
that I fled the burning city
in a long robe and sandals
with a family and a few goats.

.
That salt pillar
jolted me from my snooze.

.
Sammy Kane called Mrs. Schiff
Old Vacuum Cleaner Nose. Sammy
was truly bad. God would have turned him
to salt whether he looked back or not.

.
Through the classroom window,
I watched one cow grazing
on the far side of the parking lot.
I was thinking Lot was an odd name.

.
I was inhabiting the horror
of becoming a salt pillar, white
as a giant cigarette. Going from girl
to salt. Not me anymore.

.
And if an antelope were to lick me,
I wouldn’t feel it..

.
I thought how I loved the fullness
of being me.
And now I look back

.

to see that recognition,
that love,
was the lesson I took
from the salt pillar tale.

.

and I scrapped the one
that says, choose
between blind obedience
and obliteration.

*

We flee from our city like thieves.
How can I help but look back
to see it burning as if struck
by lightning, the whole desert aglow
with its heat, tumbleweed aflame, rolling
towards us like a giant head on fire?

.

Why did I disobey, you ask?
Why did I look back?

.

Why are those the questions?
Why don’t I have a name?

.

---

Poem from All the Hanging Wrenches by Barbara Edelman (CMU Press, 2022).

Image by Treasures of the Bible, Henry Davenport Northrop, D.D., published by International Publishing Company, 1894: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

Barbara Edelman is a writer and teacher living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her full-length poetry collections include All the Hanging Wrenches (2022) and Dream of the Gone-From City (2017), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press.