If the airline gods cooperate, I am flying later today with my mom back to Florida, where I grew up. I’ll see friends I’ve had since I was 11 and walk the beach I knew intimately as a teenager and young adult. So I’ve been thinking about how we are always carrying our earlier selves with us and about poems that capture that strange paradox of being at once old(er) and young, here and somewhere else. And I’ve wondered if I could have imagined, sitting in, say, my seventh grade English class, that I’d still be connected with so many of those people 40+ years later, if I could have imagined 40+ years later at all.
This glorious poem by Alberto Ríos stretches this idea forward, gathering up ancestors and centuries and arriving at a call to action, a cause for celebration. How appropriate that Copper Canyon Press selected its title for its forthcoming anthology of fifty years of poetry.
“The bad do not win—not finally,
No matter how loud they are.
We simply would not be here
If that were so.”
