Excerpting Senior Writers: Carla Ferreira '12

REFLECTION:

Poems are the way I seek something lasting in transience. My original idea for the thesis was to write a compilation of poems that revolved around my hometown of Newark, New Jersey, so that the poems could stand as representations of underrepresented beauty. As the process unfolded, the poems began to be about many things. I still think, though, that some of the most important of these poems find their setting in Newark. The poems of this thesis, ”In Transit,” are interested in dislocation and geography. Many of the poems are about literal moments of transportation: time spent on trains, buses, and airplanes. What all of these poems are concerned with is how to glean some permanence in the midst of change. The image I go back to often is that of a tree growing in the city; it is for me at once a symbol of resilient, uncommon, and often unnoticed strength, but also of something that is always in the process of encountering resistance to stability. Thus, the city tree recurs throughout these poems, which—if they hold anything else in common—is an obsession with memory and the movement of time.

The Red Line

At that verge when evening is not yet night

and the day is restless as to its end,

the train moves in the flow of the city.

Tired hands strain against the bars,

feeling the stress of weight bearing upon tracks.

An urban slumber suspended into a punctuated line.

Anonymous voices greet the passengers

as doors close and open and everything

pushes towards a pause while the sun melts

in echoes over rooftops and fire escapes and windows

overlooking the route, leaving the rest to a silence

of darkening shadow.  Each new image flashing

through the scratched windows into transit,

motioning forward an architectural silhouette,

leaving the small spaces of textured brick and

pavement carved into mathematical grids.

The train moves on towards Grand and Division,

marking what it may, leaving its tracks behind.

In Transit

My bags are heavy against the weight of the train

it grates against steel and I

long for continuous days which flow

into one another.  Instead

my life is a work of fragments.

Strings connected by inevitable distances.

I am lost in the fury of transit,

writing my poems in a

dark room on paper I cannot see.

Memory bites the new tongue

and I dream of home on a used pillow.

St. Lucy’s

To be granted grace in midwinter

by the softness of sunlight

breaking the smooth network

of tentative leaves in the small space

made intimate by benches and shrubs,

by its young trees whose hope rests

in tightly closed buds

as water breaks from the pipes

which crawl the brick building

is to almost forget the empty playground.

The playground

of concrete and gravel and parking spaces

becomes almost forgotten

in the sacrament of water’s flow,

a breaking of the ice

upon the pale orange wall,

seeping into pebbled earth,

streaming into crimson

eroded bricks which lie in pattern,

blessing the children’s laughter

which is no longer there,

teaching the will to stay

and the will to break.

Carla S. Ferreira is an English concentrator in Lowell House. She completed a thesis in poetry entitled “In Transit.” Next year, Carla will be teaching English in southern France and hopes to continue writing and teaching poetry.