Nuevo Mexico
I hear a long cry,
a moan,
for home.
It is coming from my chest,
a yearning for uncomplicated love,
for mountains, ruddy
as the sun sets,
for a roadrunner
in a dirt yard,
for gray virga low above distant purple hills.
It is the distance
that makes it home
______________
Bruce Parker
Review by Jan Wiezorek
Maybe it’s because I recently returned from Mexico, but Bruce Parker’s “Nuevo Mexico” has settled into me. Isn’t it remarkable how a poem can grab you in just fifty words? How moaning and mountains, love and virga (that precipitation that evaporates before hitting the ground) all enter us as part of what it means to feel the presence of home. The distances from peak to peak are seemingly impossible to measure. That explains how far away—or, rather, how near—the poem is to us.
Review by Rachel Turney
I read “Nuevo Mexico” twelve times today. I want a poem to make me feel and help me see and that’s what Bruce achieved here. I also enjoyed the use of the word virga, which I had to look up.
At first, I found the broken line style distracting and wondered if the words might be better presented as prose. However, I changed my mind because I like the way the ideas are separated and served in small, thoughtful bites.
Review by Jared Pearce
I grew up in the west, and this poem takes me back. There are probably technical things I could say, but, really, who cares. The poem makes me think of those long, western plateaus and mountains and deserts, and that’s enough for me.
Review by John Dorroh
The last two lines “..It is the distance/that makes it home” sum up how a lot of us probably feel about our own homes. Often the feeling that I’m such a long way as the crow flies to my home, as when traveling in faraway places, gives me a feeling of connectedness through distance. Or how about when I’m here, I want to be there, and when I’m there, I want to be here. That inability to be content with our particular set of circumstances seems, to me, a prevalent perspective among people in the USA. Or maybe I’m wrong? The poem made me think like that. Thanks, Bruce.
Review by Keith Hansen
There’s a lot in this little poem. It opens with longing, indefinable but, in this case, directed toward the memory of specific scenes in nature. The mountains, the roadrunner, the virga create a picture in my mind that has the look and feel of a Maynard Dixon New Mexico landscape.
Then the intriguing last two lines : “It is the distance that makes it home.” Isn’t that the truth?
Reminds me of the following from Wendell Berry’s Nathan Coulter: “Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little house and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you’d left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.”