A Moment Recalled, Shouts Out its Living

For this week's poem, we were given Claudia Cortese's poem, "What Robots Mean to Me" to read, enjoy and write off of.  It's a stunning poem and I got caught up in one of her lines and another one of her images.  Here's a draft of my poem where I play with those and the idea of how amazing Ancient Greek was as a language because of the way it was able to contain the emotions associated with experiences.

A Moment Recalled, Shouts Out its Living

On the muddy hill where we live the rains
have returned something fierce.  We were all parched.

Beneath fog wreaths floating on green redwoods,
our living sparkles like fairy lights.

Great Grandmother Inez who lived well into
her 90s was always thirsty enough

She planted a raw memory in my
mind that opened up when I visited

Tucumcari NM. It was
paper thin, a wet Japanese lantern
The rain drenched streets slurred in lit neon each
business flowing into the next like time.
 
Because my grandmother was conceived there
Because the rest of my memories of

my great grandmother shoot off of this one
like tiny insatiable sparks—

It took only four days of rain to parch
the idea of drought, to swath the hillsides

in green memory too brilliant to name.
No wonder that in Ancient Greek no one
needed words for this -

green, hillside after a much needed rain or
memories ability to keep the dead alive.