I set goals, almost daily. Since I teach time management tips to college students, you might say I set goals professionally. One of my goals was to read a poem or two every day, and right now I’m finding them on the poets.org website. Another goal was to blog on whatever stands out in my readings now and then, so I thought I’d comment on today’s poem by Hanae Jonas called “Pastoral.” I immediately connected with it. It reminded me of how I feel about growing up in the mountains of NC and spending time first in cities then back home again. I never quite feel as if I can call either city or country my own, nor do I feel as if anyone outside of this place quite gets it: “Cool/Said the flatlanders/Whose ranks I’d effectively joined.” After I read the poem, I read her remarks that she was trying to figure out how to write about Vermont—the inside and the outside, which feels right to me.
The next line hit home too: “While those I left drifted closer to one another/Or God, to the sources/Of life itself: children and dirt.” I note the irony in the final words: this poem explores what is imagined or constructed as much as what is real. Still, this glimpse of a community left to itself spoke to me. And perhaps the irony for me is that I am one of the ones who stayed, who prefers less in terms of the pace of life, and more in terms of family and nature, in ways that I’m pretty sure my friends who have left can’t fully understand.
And still people rarely see me as “from here,” and perhaps I never will be.
reader. writer. 