Poetry and Prose (Week 4 Reading)

Poetry and Prose

We Did It

Yehuda Amachai

We did it in front of the mirror
And in the light. We did it in darkness,
In water, and in the high grass.

We did it in honour of man
And in honour of woman and in honour of God.
But they didn't want to know about us,
They'd already seen our sort.

We did it with imagination and colours,
With confusion of reddish hair and brown
And with difficult gladdening
Exercises. We did it

Like wheels and holy creatures
And with chariot-feats of prophets.
We did it six wings
And six legs

         But the heavens

Were hard above us
Like the earth of summer beneath. 

Excerpts from "We Didn’t,” story by Stuart Dybek:

We didn’t in light; we didn’t in darkness. We didn’t in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn’t in your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you’d slept in as a child, or in the backseat of my father’s rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa he delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent’s meat market. We didn’t in your mother’s Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snack with silver, cruciform fangs.

At the dead end of our lovers’ lane—a side street of abandoned factories— where I perfected the pinch that springs open a bra; behind the lilac bushes in Marquette Park, where you first touched me through my jeans and your nipples, swollen against transparent cotton, seemed the shade of lilacs; in the balcony of the now defunct Clark Theater, where I wiped popcorn salt from my palms and slid them up your thighs and you whispered, "I feel like Doris Day is watching us," we didn’t.

 … But we didn’t, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns on lighting bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn’t see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love—because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter?—we made not doing it wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did.