Five Poems
2016; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 91; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.7588/worllitetoda.91.1.0013
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American Literature Studies
ResumoWORLDLIT.ORG 13 Forché: Fame is evanescent. There really is no such thing. You are yourself, regardless of whether you are “known” by a multitude of others. deNiord: Yes. Forché: You have to walk around in your body. That does not change. But I think that being “known” by people you don’t know is a very difficult experience. deNiord: In the sense, being known by people you don’t know— Forché: Yes, because of the level of exposure. You’re exposed and you can easily develop a false sense of selfhood and of reality that doesn’t correspond to actual reality. The world is no longer reflected back to you undistorted. Poets mostly never have to worry about this because they are almost never that famous in the larger world. deNiord: There are a few delusional people who think that it does matter. Forché: To provide some context on what does and does not matter: my husband took this photograph [opens to a photograph in El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers]. He was in a vehicle on a road in El Salvador, and he saw figures moving up ahead. And they were moving around on the road, so he slowed down, and he decided he wanted to see who it was and what was happening. He stopped the car, parked it, got out of the car, and walked toward the figures, and he saw that they—he showed them his camera, put his hands up, they were military—and he saw that there were bodies in the road and that the soldiers had machetes. He put his hands up and walked slowly, slowly, toward them taking pictures, and they saw that he was taking pictures. It was a period in the war when the military was proud. They stood and posed behind each of those corpses, and he took the last picture with them standing behind the corpses, as if actually wanting to be photographed. And then he got in the car and drove slowly off. But this is the picture he took, and they had just mutilated the bodies. They were soldiers— soldiers who became, in this image, anonymously and briefly famous. deNiord: They had guns, too. Forché: Yes, but they used the machetes to cut the bodies up. deNiord: It’s like the colonel being proud of the ears. Forché: That’s right. Harry [Mattison] was working for Time by then, but for some reason the photograph was published by Newsweek. It was captioned “Soldiers on Macabre Guard Duty.” So the soldiers were presented as simply “guarding.” deNiord: But they did do it. Forché: Yes. They were doing it as Harry encountered them. A Bridge by Carolyn Forché Behind us a sea-cliff, landfall, ahead the wind, tar-smoke, the sea, a carrick. We sway on a bridge between them above a great shattering. We have left the verge, our certainty, and walk across a chasm to the cries of cormorants, fulmars, the wings of mute swans singing in flight. Below us bladder-wrack, sea-froth and dulse, sea against rocks in heave and salt, and between bridge and sea an abyss we cross, as behind us the headland recedes – cottages and boats, clouds and sheep, a piping of oystercatchers dying out, and the callings of kittiwake preparing to leave their nesting ground. The bridge rises and falls with our steps, moving in wind so we must hold fast the ropes once made of hides and the hair of cows’ tails hoisted over the silvering salmon as they leapt into bag-nets too heavy to lift, hauled across this very bridge that rings in wind like ship’s rigging, volary of rock pipits, bazaar of guillemots, colony of puffins, and in the blackest water below us ghosts of salmon, empty nets, and on the carrick ruins of boats, nets, buoys and fisherman’s bothy. We have only to keep walking for the bridge to go on. The carrick is a foothold in the distance, a stone in time. When we reach it, not only may the salmon return but you will be alive again, wake me when we reach the carrick. WORLDLIT.ORG 17 like to start...
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