Vox Populi
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Rachel Hadas: Shouldering
The dream bird father sitting on my shoulder is singing in my ear: Now that you’re older than I was when I left the rocky road, it is your turn to shoulder the load, answer questions students need to ask. You are an elder now. You wear the mask of wisdom. So you tell them Tell them what? The song breaks off. In somebody’s back seat, a baby. Whose? More babies on the border. Terror, desperation, rage. Disorder of crowded house, tap leaking, family, students leaning in to question me: Where should we go now? Tell us what to do. The road’s uphill, and that is all I know, borrowing, burrowing, stirring the dark stew, blended broth of night visions and day, instructions garbled, watchmen standing tall and menacing at gates along a wall. Gaps in the rampart: raw red border zone. Children wake and cry along the line. The students’ questions pound relentlessly. Dream father, bird of omen, oh tell me – the lost, the hungry, the abandoned – who will take care of them? The grownups knew the answers to these questions. And now we are grown up, whose job is it to know? The reassuring elders, where are they? The dream bird looks at me and hops away. Always uphill the steep road poetry Scattered syllables still in my ear when I sit up and the red world is here.
Rachel Hadas’s many books include Poems for Camilla (Measure Press, 2018).
Copyright 2021 Rachel Hadas. This poem first appeared in Hudson Review. Included in Vox Populi with permission of the author.
Vox Populi 
Powerful, Rachel. Hops away!
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Wow! I loved the thoughts, the circling rhythm and rhyme.
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Beautiful in its evocation of sad past and present, with art that keeps us human and hopeful!
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Heartbreaking.
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yes!
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Thanks, Rose Mary! It’s been great seeing you at the New Hampshire Zoom poetry readings.
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