Mourner’s Kaddish by Miriam Åkervall

Miriam Åkervall is a poet and translator. Their poetry appears in Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Their translation of Astrakanerna (The Garden of the Dead) by Marie Lundquist won an Honorable Mention in the 2024 Nadia Christensen Translation Prize and is forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse. Miriam’s writing has received support from the Vermont Studio Center and the American Literary Translators Association. They live in Moscow, Idaho where they serve as the 2025-2027 Moscow Poet Laureate.

Mourner’s Kaddish

My mother always said, We’re going to visit mormor and morfar

on those days when we’d pile into my uncle’s Volvo and drive

across Malmö to their graves, passing the Khadija Mosque and Kebab Iraqi,

and pull into a gravel lot behind the Rosengård housing complex,

just a block or two from the Swedish Migration Office,

my brother chattering on about Zlatan, the famous soccer player

who grew up somewhere within these walls, and without being told,

I knew to be afraid, a slow feeling, like how the cocoons of ice

eventually reveal rosehips outside my apartment in Idaho

even though I can see them the whole time, Of all the places,

my mother would mutter as she hurried us through the gates,

past a soccer field filled with children, down the thick labyrinth hedges

where flat headstones paved the ground in dark ribbons,

and years later, when I asked her why she felt unsafe there, what happened,

she told me that a man, a white man, a Swedish man,

had followed her once, followed my dark-haired mother walking

with her blond husband down the street in Malmö, into the pizza shop

where they had ducked in to avoid him and yelled, Where were you born,

and this did not answer my question about Rosengård,

but rather another that I had not asked, about how the same fear

takes a shape particular to each body, like turning a green caterpillar

brooch into a ring that you still can’t wear, and in the cemetery,

even though mormor never prayed a day in her life after the war,

my mother would cry and ask me to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish,

which, to her great pride, I knew by heart, and as I sang

and stumbled through the many verses for the dead

that never mention death, the longest prayer I ever learned,

even though I missed my grandparents, it was not them

I mourned in that moment, singing in the empty cemetery

listening to sounds of nearby laughter and the thump of small feet

connecting with an object in motion that never quite came to rest.