2 POEMS FOR DISCUSSION, WITH QUESTIONS

These poems are on page 40 of the text, but we've also decided to post them to make sure everyone has a chance to read them closely.

Bruno Grégoire

White Siestas

At the moment I approach the shore, the white shores
under a sky of beams and rush, the refuge
of a lizard—its tongue, its drowning eyes.

The door rattles, the shutters—just barely,
under the light pressure of wind, where a whole world perishes,
a deaf pestle crushing, sun
in the ruined mortar of another world.

Cradled by the complaint or laughter of childhood
weapons are laid down outside; and liquid armfuls
in which grace cannot be contained; like water,
if not deep, refused, deserted,
I fell asleep, I asleep without finding sleep,
the sea birds, the storm clouds—


*How does the tone of the first two stanzas inform the subject matter?

--

Sanctuary

At the indefinite limits
of the city which goes to ground, at that border
littered with camels fettered together, there, where the animals live
—the sky thrust into their stomachs
by turbulent handfuls of stones, of sand—
where all my life leans into another body,
the shoulder of a child dares,
without guiding anyone along the blindness of streets—

where my hands are no longer mine in the way they brush
locks, forges, the fire
that is governed by your absence.


*How does place influence the poem artistically and politically?
*Who is the speaker and why did Grégoire choose this speaker?

QUESTION FOR BOTH POEMS:
*How is the identity of Other informed in each of these poems?