(no subject)

From an article on Carolyn Forché:

In 1987, Forche moved back to the United States. While her husband had to be away, she and her young son, Sean, took a small apartment in Provincetown, Mass. A friend, poet Daniel Simko, lived nearby. "He was upset that I wasn't writing ... and he said, `I'll take Sean for two hours every afternoon.... I'll take him out in the carriage, I'll take him to the beach.... but you have to promise to write poetry while I'm gone...."' And knowing she might succumb to the impulse to clean or shop during these respites, he added "And I want to see the pages when I get back here with him."

From Forché's "Return":

...Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.

[Full poem can be found online here -- mind, within a rant by someone who hates it. *shrug* What can I say? These lines spoke to me.]