Poem of the Week | February 10, 2018

“Goldfinch” Maia Elsner
This week we are delighted to present “Goldfinch,” a new poem by Maia Elsner.
Maia Elsner is a British-Mexican writer, who began writing poetry while studying migration and diaspora as a Henry Fellow at Harvard University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review and Colorado Review. She now lives in south London.
Goldfinch
What part of rubble makes
the architect? In the morning,
orange juice pressed fresh
in memory, tarter, not quite
the sweetenough
of home. This early hour
you wonder
what the hummingbird says
to the goldfinch of its
migration, discovering
that somewhere in the midst
of these past thirty years,
that place was found
mislaid in each
revisitation back to 1988. Now
the church is sinking through
the torn-up streets
of Coyoacan, tree-roots more deliberately
displacing concrete. They
grow too deep. At dusk,
the jacaranda scent infiltrates
colonial walks, their cobbled-ness
delineates peripheries,
and somewhere on the edge
of consciousness,
those untranslatable ridges,
replaced by roads.
Your psychotherapist states
it’s all a fog, your
confrontation & something else
you were, slips out
unbidden with you
still up at 4 am, still
jet-lagged, from that first time,
when just outside
a bird begins, with me
still wondering what part of you
I lose each day
to another language, another song.
Author’s Note
In June 2018, I returned to my family home in Oxford, after a year spent living in Boston, Massachusetts. One morning, in that first week back, I woke to the sound of familiar voices downstairs – the radio, the sound of my father squeezing fresh orange juice, laughter. I jumped out of bed, rushed downstairs, so regretful that I had missed breakfast, missed catching my parents before they went to work. But the kitchen was still dark. There was no smell of coffee bubbling on the stove. No clatter of spoons in bowls. Instead, there was just the first bird-song of morning. And my mum, wrapped in a blanket on the sofa, on the phone to her family in Mexico – as she has been, in the middle of the night, almost every night, since she left home. I grew up watching her trying to exist simultaneously in two different worlds, and I have shared her nostalgia for the land she left in 1988, that no longer exists, except, perhaps, in our joint memory and imagination.
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