As children, a younger sibling often pesters the older sibling to let them come along on their more exciting activities. This poem imagines the sibling dynamic persisting past adulthood and the elder sibling’s death. In his poem “Voices,” C.P. Cavafy says, “Ideal and dearly beloved voices of those who are dead…Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams, sometimes in thought the mind hears them.” In this imagined conversation, the rift between the two siblings isn’t merely death itself, but the chasm created by its indescribability, and the fact that, for the still-living, death is an uncrossable threshold.
When actor Beah Richards (Beulah Richardson) performed her poem, "A Black Woman Speaks of White Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of Peace” at the 1951 American People's Peace Congress, she inspired radical black women to organize the civil rights organization Sojourners for Peace and Justice.
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"I chose to translate this whole book rather than another selected edition because, although composed of individual poems, It Must Be a Misunderstanding is really a deeply affecting book-length work whose force builds as the poems cycle through their sequences. The 'plot' follows a general trajectory—from early to late Alzheimer’s—with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness."
