If your notebook packed into a knapsack tumbles
into the current of a river some October night
If this notebook’s marbled face reminds you of home, a hand-
drawn map of tectonic plates, a silt-soaked dock’s attendant moss
If the words within have ever saved you If they liken love
to glacial melts, the tides’ claw against rocks
If they liken faith to waterwings
And because the river is the Hudson, flecked with sirens Because it chews at the starboard cheek of tugboats and spits at ferries which pass
Because you think poems are breaths that hands reclaim Because you wish one day
to speak in tongues Because she should hear you read for her
Because odes are now also elegies
Because we cannot know what wake our living leaves
Because this confluence of muscle and loss Because they float just 10 yards out
Because you leap the pier’s railing headfirst
-R.A. Villanueva
Thank you to my sweet Sheryl for sharing this on Facebook a few weeks ago. It’s been rumbling around in my mind ever since, and I’m happy to share it here now. Do you have certain words that you love (or just love the sound of the word)? I do. This poem contains several of those words for me. Tectonic plates. Glacial. Elegies. Confluence. Yes, especially confluence. I love the mellifluous way that trips off my tongue, and the visual imagery that accompanies it.
“Because she should hear you read for her” Yes! I love to be read to. Maybe it comes from being read to as a child. There’s something so sweet and loving about it. It’s intimate and very comforting. One nice memory I have of my ex-husband is him reading Watership Down to me when I was pregnant. I was so sick and so tired for most of the pregnancy that most nights I fell asleep within a few minutes. I never knew why it was that particular book he chose, but I still have the same copy of it. Years later, I read it to my son.
I thought that every child was read to at bedtime. That’s just what you do with your children. I was shocked to find out that it wasn’t true. My parents read to me, and I read to my son even before he was born. We started with picture books when he was a baby and continued for years, even after he could read on his own. Reading the first few Harry Potter novels out loud took a long time, but it was great bonding time. I’d read until my voice gave out, or it was lights out time, whichever came first. I recently read an interesting study on reading aloud to children. Reading picture books with young children may mean that they hear more words, while at the same time, their brains practice creating the images associated with those words — and with the more complex sentences and rhymes that make up even simple stories. Unfortunately, there are serious disparities in how much language children hear — A well-known Kansas study that found poor children heard millions fewer words by age 3. Millions. That boggles my mind.
I had this problem so often when I was growing up. I’d look up the word in the dictionary, but those pronunciation keys boggled me. Schwa? Diphthong?
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