NaPoWriMo Day 7: Echoes of the Past

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” by sam sax

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Let’s do three brief freewrites.

First, for 3-4 minutes, answer this question: Where do you come from? Write what you know about your history, your lineage, your ancestors, the thread of people that connects you from the past to the present. 

Second, for 3-4 minutes, answer this question: What do you remember about your childhood? You can write about one memory, or offer snippets of memories stitched together in prose. 

Third, for 3-4 minutes, answer this question: What’s different between your past and your present?

There are no wrong answers here, just write what is top-of-mind.

Poem: “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” by sam sax

my grandfather castrated pigs as a child
he tells me this casual as bread
when i bring up the book i’m writing

some thirty odd years of talking
and this is the first that information raises its head
and shakes the mud from it

his father, i learn, was a farmer outside
baltimore. summers he’d be tasked with slicing
into piglets how one de-pits an avocado—

excising the sweet meats, seizing
their means of reproduction

 how many pigs did you castrate, grandpa?
just a handful
and i picture hands the size of pastures
filled with castrato pigs singing opera oddly
wagner probably

my grandfather wears shirts with buttons,
is freudian by training, obsessed with the germans
their brutalist art

i can hardly imagine him scolding a dog—

how is it we are always where we’ve been
even when unaware of it?

one moment you’re drinking a cheap beer
in a velour jump suit and the next
you’re descendent of jewish pig farmers

what might i learn if i were to write
this book on an entirely different subject:
antique clock repair, the sex lives
of astronomers, joy

This poem comes out of sax’s collection PIG, poems examining the pig in all its physical and metaphorical forms. In this poem, whose title translates to “This passes the glory of the world,” reaches a brilliant moment of insight at this couplet:

how is it we are always where we’ve been
even when unaware of it?

I love what this poem reveals about the way the past haunts the present, particularly that epiphany of how the past lingers despite our lack of knowledge about it. There’s something so uncanny about the particulars of this poem, how the speaker discovers the grotesque and unsettling minutia of their family’s pig herding history only after embarking on a poetic pig project.

I also really appreciate the poem’s pig-personification (pork-ification?) of certain ideas, like the information that “raises its head / and shakes the mud from it,” or the pigs singing opera in a pasture. There’s a lot of tenderness for the poem’s subjects, informed, of course, by the suddenly-personal nature of pigs.

Mostly, I find the poem’s final question to provoke my thinking long after the poem ends—it opens a door, which is what great poetry often does. The reach for joy alone is a bit heart-wrenching, but to also speculate on how something as random as “the sex lives / of astronomers” might relate to one’s own personal history is equally interesting. Are our personal histories deeply intertwined with all of human history? Can we find pockets of our pasts in everything we look at?

This poem invites the universal into the particular by staring at one’s own history and finding, somehow, the whole of humanity reflected back in it. It’s a daring feat, one born out of love and careful attention to the seemingly mundane.

Prompt

Write a poem in which you explore how your past echoes in your present. Let yourself be surprised by the connections you make.