As Though It Was a Small Child
by Cynthia Dewi Oka

I attend to the snow, hour after hour, marking where light
prunes its borders until an antelope appears out of the grass
below, a yellow-green leap, misshapen in the eye then
corrected in the mind because this is the immigrant's work,
isn't it, to see what isn't quite there yet, or any longer.
To hold on, then, to what cannot be called truly an image, or
a memory, but something more vivid, less accurate, a stomach's
gurgling in the dark, that organ to which neither music or language
belongs. I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean, organize my body around what cannot be spoken. It's not
that there aren't countless names for it, antelope being just
one of them, something you might recognize, too, if only from
the haze of afternoons spent once upon a time, innocently, with
the Discovery Channel or at the zoo, where the foreign and exotic
that have only power to survive but not to touch you, perform
themselves at scheduled times with either bared teeth or hula-hoops.
I had meant, of course, to write a poem about love, but I keep
getting stuck on its conditions. For instance, it is below zero
again today. I put my walls down and the snow blows into
my mouth, so when I say I love you, I love you, I mean, take
what I have been given. It is not one way. I will swallow your
estrangements, too. I’m not afraid. Tomorrow an antelope might
be a glacier, a book stitched of the heart-bursts of hummingbirds.

from the journal THE JOURNAL

I wrote this poem after re-reading Edward Said’s "Reflections on Exile and Other Essays" (Harvard University Press, 2002). I dedicate it to those who have been forcibly expelled from their/our homes; who have had their/our lineages destroyed by colonization and occupation; who have been designated savages, animals, collateral damage by those too weak to bear love as a responsibility. What I learned from Said: love conquers nothing, love carries everything.

Cynthia Dewi Oka on "As Though It Were a Small Child"

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