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[jewlers.livejournal.com]

Beginning Again
By Julia Alvarez

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night
counting over our losses again.

But if on a warm afternoon in late March,
stopping the car to trespass in a stubble field,

wearing my sister’s hand-me-down sweater,
looking back to the road where I left the car parked,

if I can let it all go: the house since sold
to strangers, the four girls in matching dresses

descending into the windy runway,
their homeland a cloudshape on a map,

if the losses, the wrong answers
(some painfully lived out),

if these are not so deeply grieved in the heart-
broken mind so that we cannot possibly recover,

so that we are always descending
into a city of strangers, always forcing

our tongues to shape the foreign word
for what we really mean, then all of us,

and I mean the whole world, can be saved.
I know that sounds like a schoolgirl talking,

a bit self-indulgent, I know there are men
with large salaries, men with kempt hair

and tidy, monosyllabic mouths, men
I have yearned for in the impersonal way

of young girls towards a god or a rockstar,
who would smile, fondling the change in their pockets

at this vision. But if the deepest loss,
short of death - of a language, of the valuable

codes of the mind, of a land dusty with ancestors -
can be, not just survived, but made into the matter

of hope, made into song, not into a hatchet
to cut off the offending parts, made into poems,

then blessed be the end of things, the loss of whatever
secures us blindly and mutely to our lives.

If in late March as I walk in a field, I let it all go,
the mourning, the holding on -

then briefly, as if for the first time,
the world untold, loved as never before,

the self beginning itself again, the field
heading for spring, the seeds sown,

the grasses bending, the car pointing
towards the horizon I’ll call home.