that north is north. How,
when I look at a map of the world, do I decide which puzzled shape is home? And in the picture book I gave him about pharaohs, how can pyramids date back four-thousand years if all the years we count, each time we write the date, are two-thousand and fifteen? My student is 27, or 25, or 29—he does not know for sure. He does not know of dinosaurs or Darwin, of Santa or satellites or germs or genes, of how his daughter can look not like him and not like his wife, but like the returned spirit of his father, killed by army bullets many harvests past, when farmers in his village stood accused of sharing rice with rebel troops. But he knows how to ride a water buffalo, how to find the best bamboo, how to cut it, carry it, transform it into walls and floor and roof to last three rainy seasons. He knows how to spear a fish, how to shroud the dead. He knows how to speak the language of his people, and the language of the government his people fled, and the language of the refugee camp where he grew from boyhood into marriage. He knows how to write a little of each of these, which mattered little, before now, because no one else he knew had ever needed written words. And now, in his new American home, he has learned to read a third grade book in English, and to drive a car, to walk in snow, to use lightbulbs, laptops, house keys. He's learned how to live with a silent tongue in this book-rich land whose people carry Moses, Medusa, Mars, and the moon as lightly as pennies in their pockets. He's learned how to stack parcels all night for FedEx, and go to classes in the day, and to keep going, day after day, knowing he has entered a life enormously full of words that point to holes in the world he thought he knew, holes through which he still can hope to someday slip into another life, easier than this. This poem was originally posted by Off the Coast, fall 2015.
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If you were that woman, sitting
every Friday in the public library, one week working through the who and how and why of simple questions whispering from your tutor’s lips, the next week learning price and pay and sale and save and How much does it cost?-- if you were that woman, then you, too, would ask for repetition of bag and back and bank, of leave and leaf and left and live, and you would struggle to produce the English sounds that held the meanings you still held inside your head: the dappled murmuring of leaves outside your childhood home, the trees full of sweet yellow fruit you could not name in this new life, the lives you left so you could live, and as you moved your lips in all the unfamiliar ways to make the sounds your tutor made, she would nod and you would smile, but you would never write, for you’d not yet know how to form or read those fast, firm letters you watched pouring from her hand, and so you’d have no way to store what you had learned except in memory and hope, alongside memories of why you’d never needed written words in your native world, where your mother had taught you all the skills of planting and harvesting and weaving and singing that you would ever need for living in a lush, good place, and alongside memories of gunfire echoing beyond the trees, of rebels begging for or stealing food, of soldiers from some distant city standing in your village, barking about loyalty and able-bodied men, and then the memories of jungle paths for five long nights, of sharing food and whispered hope with others who had dared to flee, and the memories of the daughter and the son, both born and grown high as your eye in the refugee camp on the border. The English words would nestle in amidst all this, get lost, be found again, and you would have to try to pull them out but leave the rest behind, try to let the new sounds tell you not only the hard-edged names and places of this brick and concrete life, but also how to live in it: how to take a city bus, how to pay for light, and you would sit again, again, again in a mauve chair at a round table in the library, amidst the shelves and worlds of words, struggling with your who and how and why, and you would not allow yourself to figure how much it had cost or how much you still had to pay. You would just smile and thank your tutor, and come back next Friday. This poem was originally published in The Worcester Review, Volume 34, 2013. |
AuthorThe WRAP youth group currently has around 18 members aged 12-20 who meet on Saturday afternoons to discuss issues of health, leadership, goal-setting and more. Each youth helps the refugee community through a variety of ways, translation services, homework help, volunteering at events and more. The youth group also explores different activities such as yoga, wall-climbing, boxing, dance, bowling, and baseball Archives
April 2017
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