April 5 - San Onofre, California

So, my original plan for today didn’t work out for reasons that are singular and stupid. Anyway, I’ll have it ready by Monday. In trying to come up with something new, I realized I’ve yet to post anything by a female poet, which is total bullshit on my part and I apologize.

Considering I took a poem from an anthology put together by Carolyn Forche, and the fact that she is one of our best living poets as far as I am concerned, I’m going to talk about a poem included in her second book of poetry, The Country Between Us. The poem appears in the section of the book titled “In Salvador, 1978-1980.” The title of the poem is a beach a bit north of San Diego and the U.S.-Mexico border.

San Onofre, California

We have come far south.

Beyond here, the oldest women

shelling limas into black shawls.

Portillo scratching his name

on the walls, the slender ribbons

of piss, children patting the mud.

If we go on, we might stop

in the street in the very place

where someone disappeared

and the words Come with us! we might

hear them. If that happened, we would

lead our lives with our hands

tied together. That is why we feel

it is enough to listen

to the wind jostling lemons,

to dogs ticking across the terraces,

knowing that while birds and warmer weather

are forever moving north,

the cries of those who vanish

might take years to get here.

I love the use of enjambment in this poem. Enjambment, so I can sound smart, is when a poet chooses to end a line prior to when the reader would expect. It can create surprise, tension, multiple meanings, and even humor. e.e. cummings was one of the best enjambers (which is also the perfect name for a basketball team made of poetry MFAs).

Take “Slender ribbons / of piss” as an example. By enjambing this, we at first imagine slender ribbons, pretty things we’d see at a party or celebration with ribbons hanging from the wall mentioned at the beginning of the line. Of course, our image is greatly changed by the words “of piss.” Now we are left to imagine the parabolas and tangents of urine humans create, made all the more jarring by the joyful scene we had begun to construct.

OK, lemme jump back from technical stuff. What we have just read is one of my favorite examples of how to make a political poem without being overly political. Politics is something we are constantly affected by in at least a passive way. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that our lives are political lives.

One of the strengths of this poem, to me, is its ability to discuss the politics of the time and place without leaving the realities of our lives. We are all always affected by politics, but for the people of this poem, politics has become an active, fickle, dangerous and shadowy intruder.

The first image of this poem, “the oldest women shelling limas into black shawls,” does a wonderful job of being quotidian and ominous at the same time. Full Disclosure: I had to look up what a lima was, but am so glad I did. (If you have a smartphone, I highly recommend the Dictionary.com app.)

Clams, yo.

A lima, as evinced by “shelling,” is a kind of clam. However, the word itself is, in a kind of roundabout way, a Spanish corruption of an Incan word meaning “to speak.” This goes back to the history of the Peruvian capital, and the use of language by those in power.

The oldest in Korea can still speak Japanese, the oldest Vietnamese can still speak French. I knew a guy from Azerbaijan and woman from Ukraine whom spoke Russian to each other.

Despite what may be a bit of a stretch, this idea that the oldest women are literally disarming speech and tucking it into black fabric creates an immediate image of death and censorship thriving just below the surface of food and prosperity, and not unlike how a clam lives inside a shell and just under the surface of the sand.

Oh my, I could write about this poem all night. Considering it’s Friday, I ain’t got no job, I ain’t got no money, and I got shit to do, I just may. I’ma abruptly end here.