As Children Together

I can't get the last stanza of "As Children Together" out of my head:

If you read this poem, write to me
I have been to Paris since we parted

It's amazing how childhood dreams and promises stick with us - how they seem more important to fulfill.  Everything that has gone on between these two women, everything that's happened since they last saw each other - I can completely understand this to be one of the most important things that's transpired since their last meeting.  I immediately think of the plans my childhood best friend's and I made, the pacts we made when we also declared to be friends forever, I'm sure we've all said that to people it ended up not being true with.  I had a similar encounter with my best friend from kindergarten, we hadn't spoken since maybe middle school but in our senior year of high school - she called me up just to tell me she got into Harvard.  When we were little kids all her Barbie's "went" to Harvard and she'd tell all of our teachers throughout elementary school that that was where she would be, barely knowing at the time what that meant.  After all that time she remembered how I knew that about her, how after she'd moved a few times no one at her current school understood that like I did.  I've talked to her maybe a couple times since, that was four years ago and she graduated back in May.  We didn't talk directly again but I said congrats on Facebook and she thanked me.
I think of the promises I've made to my best friends now, the ones I've known for 2, 5, 10 years - the plans we've made and how many or how few have gone through.  I still take those oaths very seriously.  One of my closest friends I only met two years ago, but we were roommates on a study abroad trip to London.  I'd never been on a plane before that and she'd never been out of the country.  We're both broke and could barely afford the trip but we made it happen.  I've promised her dozens of times that we'll go together again, and I intend to keep that, no matter how long it takes.

I do wonder though, am I doing this for her, or more for me?  Is it important to us to keep those promises not only to our friends, but to our dreaming childhood self?  

Read More »

Forche

The choice of word hands at the end of the section of The Country between Us, by Carolyn Forche was interesting to me.  The last line in the poem reads, "Tenderness is in the hands." What a true statement.  The government held the power of life and death in their hands and did not seem to show much tenderness.  Both poems depict graphic images of human cruelty and serious human rights violations.  The government of El Salvador had the power in their hands to choose tenderness or brutality.  The word hand is also in the poem The Colonel.  He is holding a human ear,"He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces,..."(3725) The colonel does not use his hands for tenderness nor does he use them tenderly. He shakes the ear in their face and he has also ordered to have the ears cut off of human beings. 

Read More »