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The World Is Too Full to Talk About

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increasingly I am beginning <strong>to</strong> understand your outlines<br />

I have a better image of your childhood.<br />

I know moments in the summers of your youth<br />

sleeping in your grandfather’s house in the west.<br />

<strong>The</strong> red sea is large and smiling. Smiling at you!<br />

A full life! a secret song in the afternoon when everyone is having<br />

lunch<br />

and the sun comes in so large through the window as if it shines only<br />

for you<br />

when you were fifteen it was clear that God loved you<br />

that same year a few cities away I was the same age<br />

my skin was different, it looked different and smelled different and I<br />

unders<strong>to</strong>od<br />

things pass by, glide by painfully and fast and before you could stand<br />

up <strong>to</strong> speak it has already died<br />

Though I barely saw the sun and never saw the sea, I lived <strong>to</strong>o inside<br />

my sisters room, and wanted so desperately <strong>to</strong> enter my mother’s chest<br />

and wear her skin<br />

so when I looked at her so perplexed, it would not be such<br />

(4)<br />

poetry is not a quest for the truth its an attempt<br />

like all art<br />

<strong>to</strong> embody and capture tyrannical, inevitable suffering.<br />

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