I was the daughter who changed overnight
from clingy, thumb in her mouth, a problem child,
always afraid and needing to be soothed
to feisty, elbows-out, watch-out-for-her!
What happened—so the family story goes—
was that I picked up reading and began
to make things up, to take the hurricane
out of the wind, bring back the disappeared,
replace the shanty shacks with palaces,
and turn the beggars loose on my vegetables.
I yearned to write the story of my life
into a book a girl might want to read,
a girl like me, no longer frightened by
the whisperings of terrified adults,
the cries of uncles being rounded up,
the sirens of the death squads racing by
toward a destination I could change
with an eraser or a trick ending.
There had to be a way to make the world
safer, so I could bear to live in it!
This might not be the destiny of art,
to save the uncles, free the prisoners
with a twist of plot, but it’s a start
if Wordsworth had it right, and the child is
father of the man—but just a start.
The inhumanity of our humanity
will not be fixed by metaphor alone.
The plot will fail, the tortured will divulge
our names, our human story end, unless
our art can right what happens in the world.