Vox Populi
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Jennifer L Freed: Lessons
If you were that woman, sitting every Friday
in the public library, one week working through
the who and how and why
of simple questions whispering from your tutor’s lips,
the next week learning price and pay and sale and save
and How much does it cost?—
if you were that woman, then you, too,
would ask for repetition of bag and back and bank,
of leave and leaf and left and live,
and you would struggle to produce the English sounds
that held the meanings you still held
inside your head: the dappled murmuring of leaves
outside your childhood home, the trees
full of sweet yellow fruit you could not name in this new life,
the lives you left so you could live,
and as you moved your lips in all the unfamiliar ways
to make the sounds your tutor made,
she would nod and you would smile, but
you would never write, for you’d not yet know how
to form or read those fast, firm letters
you watched pouring from your tutor’s hand,
and so you’d have no way to store what you had learned
except in memory and hope,
alongside memories of why you’d never needed written words
in your native world, where your mother had taught you
all the skills of planting and harvesting and weaving and singing
that you would ever need for living in a lush, good place,
and alongside memories of gunfire echoing beyond the trees,
of rebels begging for or stealing food,
of soldiers from some distant city
standing in your village, barking about loyalty
and able-bodied men,
and then the memories of jungle paths for five long nights,
of sharing food and whispered hope with others who had dared
to flee, and the memories of the daughter and the son,
both born and grown high as your eye in the refugee camp
on the border.
The English words would nestle in amidst all this,
get lost, be found again, and you would have to try
to pull them out but leave the rest behind, try
to let the new sounds tell you
not only the hard-edged names and places
of this brick and concrete life, but also
how to live in it—
how to take a city bus, how to pay
for light— and you would sit again, again, again
in a mauve chair at a round table in the library,
amidst the shelves and worlds
of words, struggling with your who and how and why,
and you would not allow yourself
to figure how much it had cost,
or how much you still had to pay.
You would smile and thank your tutor,
and come back next Friday.
~
Copyright 2025 Jennifer L Freed. First published in Worcester Review.
Photo: Tutor and Learner (San Francisco Library)
Jennifer L Freed’s recent poetry appears in journals and anthologies including Atlanta Review, OneArt, Rust and Moth, Sheila-Na-Gig, and What The House Knows (Terrapin Books, 2025). Her collection When Light Shifts (finalist, 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize) explores themes of identity, health, and care-giving in the aftermath of her mother’s cerebral hemorrhage. Awards include the Frank O’Hara Prize and the Samuel Washington Allen Prize.
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This poem should be read aloud and again and again to those who will nudge someone in the supermarket, “We speak English here, you know”. I have heard the struggle of the English speakers in foreign countries. What an important poem, hopefully making a difference in those who do no think much further than their Walmart. And now that language struggle seems to serve nobody. You are going to El Salvador even if you are a legal US citizen. All those who resist, better learn Spanish.
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Yes
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“The English words would nestle in amidst all this,
get lost, be found again, and you would have to try
to pull them out but leave the rest behind, try
to let the new sounds tell you
not only the hard-edged names and places
of this brick and concrete life, but also
how to live in it—
how to take a city bus, how to pay
for light— and you would sit again, again, again”. I will read again and again and remember students and worry about those who are new and learning and fearing now.
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Thanks, Barbara.I love this poem for lots of reasons, including the way it unwinds down the page in a steady flow.
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Jennifer, the author of this poem, asked me to say to all the subscribers, especially the ones who commented here: “Thank you for your kind words and reading. Very much”
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Just lovely morning fair in troubled times to remind us what we endure has been endured and will endure but the words weaving us through it are the most enduring.
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Thanks, Matt.
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Beautiful, important poem. The kind that alerts you, raises your consciousness, enlarges your capacity for empathy. Thanks Jennifer, for writing, and Michael, for publishing.
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Thanks, Judith. Having tutored quite a few foreign and special needs students, I recognize the experience this poem describes.
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The well-crafted, generous, beautiful poem, blazes a path through the dark and dangerous jungles of our world. In dark times poems can point through and beyond the desolations. So can tutors, mentors, truth-tellers of all sorts, libraries. “Hope-construction” is a key task today.
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Well-said as always, Jim. Thank you.
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….as I do also, Sean: I read! What a fabulous poem — how I will read it over and again as well!
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Thank you for your lovely comments. Very much.
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“The lives you left so you could live…!”
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A devastatingly fabulous poem! I want to reprint all its great moments but its all here ready again to read and read and read. So again, I read!
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Me too, Sean. Without readers and listeners, there is no poetry.
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