Jennifer L. Freed
My Student Asks Me How I Know
My student asks me how I know
that north is north. How,
if I look at a map of the world, do I decide
which puzzled shape is home?
And in the picture book I gave him,
how can it say pyramids date back four-thousand years
if all the years we count, each time we write the date,
are two-thousand twenty-five?
My student is 27, or 25, or 29—he does not know
for sure. He does not know of dinosaurs
or Darwin, of Santa or satellites or germs or genes,
of how his daughter can look like the returned spirit
of his father, killed
by army bullets many harvests past,
when farmers in his village stood accused
of sharing rice with rebel troops.
But he knows
how to find the best bamboo,
how to cut it, carry it, transform it
into walls and floor and roof to last
three rainy seasons.
He knows how to spear a fish,
how to shroud the dead.
He knows the language of his people,
and the language of the government his people fled,
and the language of the refugee camp
where he grew from boyhood into marriage.
He knows how to write a little of all three of these,
which mattered little, before now,
because so few of those he knew had ever needed
written words.
And now he’s learned to read
a third-grade book
in English,
how to drive a car, to walk in snow.
He’s learned to live with a silent tongue in a text-rich land
whose people carry Moses, Medusa, Mars, and the moon
as lightly as pennies in their pockets.
He’s learned how to stack packages all night
and go to classes in the day,
and to keep going, day after day,
in a language that points to holes
in the world he thought he knew,
holes through which he hopes to someday
fit into another life, easier
than this.