The Poetry Stash: 06Mar2024

By Accident by Julia Alvarez

Today’s poem is “By Accident” by Julia Alvarez from the collection A Poem of Her Own, Voices of American Women Yesterday and Today, edited by Catherine Clinton. The book is available for purchase here.

By Accident by Julia Alvarez

Sometimes I think I became the woman
I am by accident, nothing prepared
the way, not a dramatic wayward aunt
or moody mother who read Middlemarch,
or godmother who whispered, You can be
whatever you want! and by doing so
performed the god-like function of breathing
grit into me. Even my own sisters
were more concerned with hairdryers and boys
than the poems I recited ad nauseum

in our shared bedrooms when the lights were out.
You’re making me sick! my sisters would say
as I ranted on, Whitman’s Song of Myself
not the best lullaby, I now admit,
or Chaucer in middle English which caused
many a nightmare fight. Mami! they’d called,
She’s doing it again! Slap of slippers
in the hall, door clicks, and lights snapped on.
Why can’t you be considerate for once?
“I am,” I pleaded, “these are sounds, sweet airs,

that give delight and—” Keep it to yourself!
my mother said, which more than anything
anyone in my childhood advised
turned me to this paper solitude
where I both keep things secret and broadcast
my heart for all the world to read. And so,
through many drafts, I became the woman
I kept to myself as I lay awake
in that dark bedroom with the lonesome sound
of their sweet breathing as my sisters slept.

Prompts:

1.	Begin with “You can be…”
2.	Begin with “I now admit…”
3.	Make a list of childhood goals/dreams you had. Make a list of goals you currently have. Compare and contrast the two lists. Draft a poem from these 2 lists or imagine the lists that you would have made if you had been born at another time or in another place or someone other than yourself.
4.	What things do you keep secret and what things to you broadcast in a public space? Write for 10 minutes.

5. Photo by Fatima Yusuf. Use this image as a writing prompt.

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