Instead, I’m Here to Tell You Very Softly by Oliver de la Paz
Instead, I'm Here to Tell You Very Softly
Oliver de la PazI wished you saw it—the festival
lined our streets with white banners and if I seem
lost it’s because the city held me
ransom and there were young girls
with baskets on every corner with tulips making
appeals for no rain, for the chalk paintings
on the sidewalks to not stream, to not muddy
or blur like the ruin of a New Year’s party,
but the colors were everywhere, filling our sewers
and the sewers turned very beautiful with that
brought-in-from-the-ocean feeling you get
from nets full of fish, and yes, I wanted to eat
the hues but they were so quickly to the sea,
and yes, the white banners
sagged on the lampposts, and all the chalk art
was lost, sluiced, but softly, I’m here
to say that it’s summer again and the undulant rows
of banners break my heart every time, every time
because when I tell you this you look so
kindred, so swift, so uncaught.
MARGINALIA
1.
Day 25 of The Sealey Challenge. Today’s offering is Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz.
2.
What a tender and haunting exploration of memory this book is. The orchards in these poems serve as powerful symbols of the past—of both sweetness and labor, of growth and decay. They are spaces where the speaker’s youthful discontent played out—but just as orchards go through cycles of bloom and harvest, of withering and renewal, so too do these poems.
3.
A requiem is a mass for the dead—and the poet mourns not just the literal loss of the orchards but also the loss of youth, of innocence, and of the unfulfilled promises of what has gone before. Each “Requiem” poem in the collection becomes a meditation on what has been left behind—of what has been lost to time. There’s sense of longing for the versions of himself that once walked among those trees.
4.
I found this to be a deeply moving collection—it captures the tension between the desire to forget and the need to remember. How does our relationship with our past evolve as we grow older? Memory is selective, but what guides that selection? What role does forgiveness play in remembering?
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz, published by University of Akron Press, 2010. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“These are vivid, visceral poems about coming of age in a place ‘where the Ferris Wheel / was the tallest thing in the valley,’ where a boy would learn ‘to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck / with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.’ . . . In spite of such hardscrabble cruelties”or because of them”there is also a real tenderness in these poems, the revelations of bliss driving along an empty highway ‘like opening a heavy book, / letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower.’ . . . The poet has a gift for rendering his world in cinematic images. . . . In short, these poems are the stuff of life itself, ugly and beautiful, wherever or whenever we happen to live it.” — Martin Espada” (Source)
ABOUT OLIVER DE LA PAZ
Oliver de la Paz is the author and editor of several books. His most recent book, The Diaspora Sonnets (Liveright Press 2023) was the winner of the New England Book Award, the Julie Ward Howe Award, and was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross where he is the James N. and Sally L. O’Reilly Barrett Professor in Creative Writing and he serves as the Worcester, Massachusetts Poet Laureate. (Source)
Read more poems by Oliver de la Paz • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Follow on Instagram • Bluesky • Facebook • Website • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 25 of The Sealey Challenge 2024—a community challenge to read one book of poetry a day for the month of August, named after Nicole Sealey.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: memory • cities • tenderness • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
