When, after many
years, the raptor beak
Let loose of you,
He
dropped your tiny body
In the
scarab-colored hollow
Of
a carriage, left you like a finch
Wrapped in its nest
of linens wound
With linden leaves
in a child’s cardboard box.
Tonight the wind is
hover-
Hunting as the
leather seats of swings go back
And forth with no
one in them
As certain and
invisible as
Red
scarves silking endlessly
From a magician’s
hollow hat
And
the spectacular catastrophe
Of your endless
childhood
Is done.
Oh what
a despondent poem. From the very beginning, it has the sorrowful tone of
something lost. And from the poem, the best guess of what is lost is a child.
Take the title “The Halo That Would Not Light.” What beings have halos? Only
things that are pure and gentile, ‘a little angel’ also comes to mind. But it
would not light? Something is wrong. Brock-Broido uses these “once removed” clichés
through her poem. (This sadness is not uncommon for her poems, a common subject
of her poetry is death and mortality, according The Poetry
Foundation.org) The
second line says, “the raptor beak let loose of you.” What other Avian species
are associated with birth? Only Raptor suggests something much more violent. After
this, the childish diction continues, with “tiny body,” “carriage,” “linens,”
among others, but is followed closely with more foreboding words, words that suggest
at least dried-out-and-forgotten, like “scarab-colored hollow” (Egyptian mummy?),
“linden leaves in a child’s cardboard box” (which by the way are heart shaped
leaves) and no one in swings to be pushed. However, the real decisive factor is
that the child never even lived is the very last line. If a childhood is endless,
it means that the child never grew up. Moreover, if it is done, they are never
going to grow up
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