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.
3 Comments
Jessica LeMay
4/5/2017 11:57:15 am
Hi Jennifer,
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5/8/2017 04:50:42 am
Hi, Jessica
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5/8/2017 04:50:05 am
Hi, Jessica
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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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