What Memory Can Save

I’ll open with a short poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Resuscitation  For a second: jackrabbit prints on snow and you’re in the  frame again, lifting your arms to lower the sky for me.  On this side of Bridge Street we collect all the dead  sunflowers, cut rot from an amaryllis bulb  to end its dormancy.  Our box turtle wakes thin in spring. Asleep  all winter she witnessed  nothing. For a second small as a strawberry  all my dead are alive.    Sara Daniele Rivera    The Blue Mimes    Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award    Graywolf Press, 2024

Loss permeates the pages of this remarkable collection. The poet bears more than a single grief, but her father’s death is the primary loss here. “You,” she writes. “My father.” Her poems remember him so vividly that, line after line, he lives for us—and surely for his daughter the poet. Grief is about what we have lost but also about what memory can save.

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“Resuscitation” saves three details from an ordinary winter day. The poet notices “jackrabbit prints on snow.” She helps “collect all the dead // sunflowers, cut rot from an amaryllis bulb.” But notice her first stanza break: “we collect all the dead”

In the moment, yes, we are hearing about bloomed-out sunflowers being gathered to make way for new growth as spring approaches. But a father has been lost—likely the you addressed in the opening lines; others have been lost. On page 47, as we read Rivera’s third line, already we have witnessed the magic in poems that “collect all the dead.”

Three short stanzas in, Rivera breaks from the immediate moment to comment on her box turtle waking from hibernation. “Asleep / all winter she witnessed // nothing.” So far this poem has lived in one ordinary succession of moments—and beautifully so. But then, set against the word nothing: “For a second small as a strawberry / all my dead are alive.”

I revel in this phrase: “a second small as a strawberry.” I revel in a surprise entirely unexpected—this odd fusion, a measure of time experienced as the taste of a single delicious berry. I revel in the transformative power of surprise, that, if only for a moment, “all my dead are alive.”

Note

On August 29, 2019, twenty-five poets gathered at the National Hispanic Cultural center here in Albuquerque. Twenty-two of these poets had been invited by then Albuquerque Poet Laureate Michelle Otero—to read poems in memory of those who lost their lives in El Paso on August 3, 2019. The reading culminated with the presentation of a collaborative poem by Hakim Bellamy, Jessica Helen Lopez, and Michelle Otero, all of whom have served as Poet Laureate for Albuquerque. Sara Daniele Rivera was one of the twenty-two poets recruited for this event. Her poem for the event, “Fields Anointed with Poppies,” is also the last poem in The Blue Mimes. Like the other poems Rivera offers here, this one is well worth your attention.

The poems from August 29, 2019, were collected in 22 Poems & a Prayer for El Paso. Dos Gatos Press published this little volume, but Michelle Otero and the contributing poets deserve the credit for the poems and the event. Disclosure: I’m a co-founder and publisher at Dos Gatos Press.

About the Author

Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban Peruvian American artist, writer, translator, and educator. Sara's poetry and fiction use both speculative and realist lenses to explore themes of grief, migration, memory, and the liminal spaces between language and silence. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband, cats, and turtles.

For more about Sara, see her website ⇒

The Blue Mimes is available here ⇒

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