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Identify your favorite lines from the selected poems of Carolyn Forché in her powerful collection of poems, The Country Between Us. Here are the instructions:

1.        Cite the specific lines that moved you or stirred your soul, including the title of the poem from which the lines come.

2.        Provide at least a sentence or two to explain the impact of these lines on you.

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My fingernails, pecks of light

on your thighs.

The stink of the fire escape.

The wet butts of cigarettes

you crushed one after another.

How I watched the morning come

as you slept, more my son

than a man ten years older.

How my breasts feel, years

later, the tongues swishing

in my dress, some yours, some left by other men.

After having vividly described the “room” they took in the city, these following lines from Reunion illustrate to my olfactory and visual senses the scene as she had remembered it years ago. Before this reunion, she indicated that the tongues swishing in her dress were left by him and also by other men—did she need to get through other men in pursuit of forgetting this unforgettable man?

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The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

These lines made a huge impact on me, as I think a lot of Filipinos can relate with this. We are always living with fear that some rich politician or member of police will kill us if we ever open our mouths and say anything that oppose them. These politicians and police are just playing nice in the beginning especially during elections but afterwards they show the monsters that they are. The line that states there the ears on the grocery bag shows how to their eyes we are just like livestock being sold in the market and they will have no remorse in killing anyone, especially those who do not have power.

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Because One Is Always Forgotten | Reyjie Gabriel Rosique

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Because One Is Always Forgotten | Reyjie Gabriel Rosique

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The heart is the toughest part of the body.

Tenderness is in the hands.

The poem remembers Jose Rudolfo Viera and his death in times of militant violence erasing the identities of an uprising. This particular line resonates a sense of strength in its faith in the heart and compassion, and the hope for peace and kindness from the hands of the people.

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Each time I find you

again between the cars, holding out

a scrap of bread for me, something

hot to drink, until there are

no more cities and you pull me

toward you, sliding your hands

into my coat, telling me

your name over and over, hurrying

your mouth into mine.

We have, each of us, nothing.

These lines struck me with how people can like and love people. The vivid imagery that it upholds helps create this feeling of enchantment for me, with the lines, “holding out a scrap of bread for me, something hot to drink, until there are no more cities and you pull me toward you,” the actions of a person expressing their genuine kindness and admiration, plus the last 2 lines which offers generosity and love like no other, even when both persons possess nothing, they would still give everything and themselves to each other.

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Ourselves or Nothing | Jacqueline Andrieux

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Ourselves or Nothing | Jacqueline Andrieux

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There is a cyclone fence between

ourselves and the slaughter and behind it

we hover in a calm protected world like

netted fish, exactly like netted fish.

It is either the beginning or the end

of the world, the choice is ourselves

or nothing.

These lines stood out to me because of how beautifully it captures the idea of ignorance that comes from a place of privilege. Like netted fish, some are blissfully unaware of their own entrapment only until they try to push the bounds of their reality. However, because of the comfort that privilege brings, most do not feel compelled to venture out of the confines of what they perceive as reality. This then becomes a double-edged sword where, because their protected world is all they have ever known, they remain in the dark of issues that could very soon pierce their perfect bubble.

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You will fight and fighting, you will die. I will live and living cry out until my voice is gone to its hollow of earth, where with our hands and by the lives we have chosen we will dig deep into our deaths.

These lines struck me because I believe the poem "Message" aims to highlight how people choose to fight for peace and hope in their own ways, amidst a time in their lives when all they can do is participate in or support revolutionary movements, despite the struggle and powerlessness that one may experience in this situation. However, these lines underline the importance of continuing to fight in a way that is motivated by unity, loyalty, and dedication in order to reflect even the smallest signs of progress. This is a value that I have always known as a student: the ability to fight for a cause even when adversity exposes me to numerous risks, because it demonstrates dedication to the greater good as a return for years of struggle.

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This is not paella, this is what has become of those who remained in Buenos Aires. This is the ring of a rifle report on the stones, her hand over her mouth, her husband falling against her.

This particular work drew me to it because it destroys what your initial impressions of the poem is when you first read it. It is not a warm recollection of something nice that you would want to keep in your memory forever for all the good reasons--it is a grim remembrance of murder and the life-altering event of witnessing your loved one take one last tragic breath right in front of you. The paella symbolizes the trauma that this memory brings, and a cruel reflection of what a society they have formerly lived in has evolved into.

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"There is nothing one man will not do to another."

From the context of the poem, the speaker is in prison, imagining his wife and in prison, we are aware of what kind of torture people can go through just to get information out of them, or to simply just send a message. This one line moved me the most, because it reminds me of how far humans can go to achieve their goals, what horrible thing one person can do to another– even if it means letting go of their morals.

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Each time

we lose people. Each time I find you

again between the cars, holding out

a scrap of bread for me, something

hot to drink, until there are

no more cities and you pull me

toward you, sliding your hands

into my coat, telling me

your name over and over, hurrying

your mouth into mine.

We have, each of us, nothing.

We will give it to each other.

I specifically find the last two lines, "We have, each of us, nothing. We will give it to each other" very impactful given the context of the rest of the poem. I interpret it as a story about a love that develops between two strangers amid uncertainty, and those last lines reveal the transient experience of finding love in a time of war. While "having nothing" they nonetheless give it to each other because they find it better than having that nothing on your own---the love reveals their shared loneliness.

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Tonight you begin to fight

for the most hopeless of revolutions . . . I have done all that I could do.

The poem as a whole struck me because it effectively conveyed the pain of having to fight in a battle wherein the odds are overwhelmingly against you. Among the lines of the poem, those cited above particularly tugged at my soul because they showed a glimmer of hope amidst uncertainty, showing that although there are a lot of challenges that may come our way, there is value in persevering in order to move closer toward our goal.

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For the Stranger (Ma. Julyanna M. Ancajas)

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For the Stranger (Ma. Julyanna M. Ancajas)

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Each time we lose people. Each time I find you again between the cars, holding out a scrap of bread for me, something hot to drink, until there are no more cities and you pull me toward you, sliding your hands into my coat, telling me your name over and over, hurrying your mouth into mine. We have, each of us, nothing. We will give it to each other.

In the immediate aftermath of a war, people exhibit a strong need for human connection and dependence, for these are the only things that keep them alive. After being robbed of everything, people, even strangers, find strength in each other, sharing what little they have and forming bonds that far outweigh the atrocities of the war. This passage stood out to me because it's a beautiful way of saying that we have each other, through redemption and healing, even in the wake of destruction.

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The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

These specific lines from "The Colonel" hit me as it shows how a militarized government operates. In the poem, the colonel is a dictator who governs with military power while the ears are the people he governs. This shows that the colonel does not even care about the rights of the people because as a dictator, he is the government. The ones who don't listen to his rule, as portrayed by the ears, are "pressed to the ground" which means detaining or even killing them. The ones who do listen only catches a scrap of his voice meaning they don't listen to it as a whole because they don't really understand it.

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From "The Expatriate"

"The film In the Realm of the Senses,

and piles of shit burning and the risk

of having your throat slit. Twenty-year-old poet."

"To be in love with some woman who cannot speak

English, to have her soften your back with oil

and beat on your mattress with grief and pleasure as you take her from behind, moving beneath you like the beginning of the world."

This passage from the poem "The expatriate" really touched my senses because of the dark mystery of the passages; that overall, the message of the poem itself, unlike some readings in the book such as "The Colonel" which convey a clearer message; and the use of the "Realm of the Senses," which is a movie related to a relationship with a prostitute, already implies that the man writing this poem is in a taboo relationship and reading along the lines, it seems that the man is passionately falling in love to a woman, within a fundamentalist Islamic environment (Islamist, not normal Islam); with a risk or caveat of peril behind such intimacy.

These passages stirred my soul as it somehow placed me into fear or nervouness because of the danger they bring in their lives, especially if a very authoritarian government can hunt them to torture and yearned that they may be safe in the name of Allah (swt).

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If we go on, we might stop

in the street in the very place

where someone disappeared

and the words Come with us! we might

hear them

This excerpt was taken from San Onofre, California, the first poem from Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us. I especially enjoyed the tonal shift from what seems to be Carolyn reflecting on what most people think the Global South is (which earlier in the poem was characterized as beach life and breezes) into what it truly is: a place hidden and enshrouded by injustice. A place most people think of as a destination for vacation, when stripped back, could be a setting of a crime.