Since I’m writing this during COVID-19 isolation, the first thing I want to write is “Hey! Remember traveling? Remember how that was a thing we did once?”
I’ve been fortunate to have traveled extensively, and the most important thing I learned is to go with the flow. There’s so much you can’t control. Late flights, full hotels, bad weather, grumpy people (including myself). Sometimes what looks like a disaster turns out to be an adventure.
Or sometimes what we take with us from traveling may be the memory of a moment: a spectacular sculpture at a museum. A mountain rising high in the distance. A local who, when we were lost, was so kind that we remember her face to this day.
Poet Rita Dove captures a moment just before boarding a plane in “Vacation:”
…the heeled bachelorette trying
to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s
exhausted mother waiting to be called up early
while the athlete, one monstrous hand
asleep on his duffel bag, listens,
perched like a seal trained for the plunge…
The image of the athlete is particular striking — you can sense the tension in his body, ready to jump up when his row is called.
In “The Road to Biloxi,” Khaled Mattawa describes how the mundane scenery in Mississippi reminds him of the brutality and death caused by white expansion:
…And the salty air we came to breathe
did not appear, only swamp algae
and the death smell of moss, the slime
the invisible webs that trapped ghosts
in lukewarm water, the dead who would not dissolve —
Tom Sawyer, not dissolving, Huck Finn
not dissolving, Big Jim not dissolving
Goodman, Chaney, Medgar not dissolving
Cherokee tears floating on top like drops of oil
Lakotas still streaming down, Kiowas
still coming down, Sioux still floating
still in the Mississippi…
Mattawa’s disappointment with his trip leads him to a deep rumination on all the violence that had happened in this land, and all that was still happening.
Today, write a poem about a travel experience, a memory that stays with you. It could be a moment, a scene, a person you met, the beauty of a natural setting. Like Mattawa’s poem, it could be about something on the road that prompted a reflection on the history of a place.
