Freshman year in high school, poetry class, and I was reading through the book, and the teacher asked me a question and though I could normally answer a question without even one ear half-cocked ("It concerns man's inhumanity to man" was always good), the poem I had just read had so torn me that I couldn't speak. If I opened my mouth, I would start crying and I would never stop. I knew it. So I just shook my head at her, poor teacher of poetry to freshman girls, ever so many hormones and so much angst, and she blinked at me and I put my head down on the desk, where it stayed for the rest of the class.
I've thought about that poem a lot in the last couple decades. I can't describe it to anybody without crying afresh, and that makes it hard to track down. Anyway, via the magic of the series of tubes, I did manage to find it finally. And it is as good as I remember.
This story has three morals:
1. If you have created something, it meant something to somebody even
if you never hear about it. Whether you draw pride from breaking a high
school student's heart in a freshman poetry class or whether you have higher
ambitions doesn't matter. What matters is: it mattered.
2. If you keep looking, you will find it.
3. If you are at your desk when you read this, it is okay to put your
head down and cry (If it doesn't make you cry, I don't want to hear
about it, because you are talking to 14-year-old me and you will break
my heart AGAIN).
Dateline
Death
by
Suzanne Gross
The
paper told where
it
happened of course.
I
have forgotten
the
place now. It could
have
been the corn-green
town
where I was born
and
the trestle curves
a
little west to
cross
the power dam:
There
where I stood once,
stricken
on the bank
above
the rainbow,
and
let explosions
in
the water spin
me
down and drown me.
The
paper said three
children
walked across
a
trestle tall as
mine
was. They were one
boy
nine years old, one
girl
of six, and one
thirteen,
who was her
sister.
When they had
come
halfway across,
the
water running
louder
under them,
glittering
more now
into
their squinting,
they
heard the diesel
horn
behind them blow.
Silently
all three
began
to run. Then
the
youngest fell, caught
her
ankle hard, down
between
the shaking
ties.
The others leaped,
before
they missed her,
safe
from the roadbed.
Then,
only then, one
saw
her sister held
before
the train, who
turned
again, ran back
again,
and tore at
the
shackled foot. Then
she
knelt on the ties
and
took her sister
in
her arms, blinding
her
against her breast,
and
said to her see,
I am
here with you,
there
is nothing to
be
frightened of.
And
the train struck them.
It
may have taken
five
minutes at the
most,
the newspaper
said.
She could not have
known
the thing she chose.
She
could not have known.
Yeah. I get it.
Posted by: kathy n | March 17, 2009 at 04:14 AM
I wouldn't be able to speak either.
Posted by: Julia | March 17, 2009 at 09:23 AM