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it’s amazing how death
is always around the corner,
or not even so far away
as that, hiding in the little pleasures
that some of us would go
so far as to say
are the only things
keeping us alive
Copyright © 2013 by Jason Schneiderman. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on May 22, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
In one story, the lovers are two halves
split by jealous gods, and in another story,
the lovers are victims of a wicked baby
with a bow and arrow. In one story,
love means never touching, but exchanging
a lot of handkerchiefs, and in another story,
I used to love words,
but not looking them up.
Now I love both,
the knowing,
and the looking up,
the absurdity
of discovering that "boreal"
has been meaning
"northern" all this time
or that "estrus"
is a much better word
for the times when
I would most likely
have said, "in heat."
When I was translating,
the dictionary
was my enemy,
the repository of knowledge
that I seemed incapable
of retaining. The foreign word
Do you remember Sita? How when Hanuman came to rescue her she refused, how she insisted that Rama come openly, defeat her captor Ravana openly? She had no desire for stealth, no desire for intrigue, and though Ravana could not touch her for the curse on his flesh, she remained captive until Rama came. Do you remember that she was tortured? That Hunaman asked her for permission to kill the women who had tortured her? Do you remember how she walked through fire to prove her purity, even though everyone knew of the curse on Ravana?