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My mother would tell me
that the whole village fled like a child
until it was lost,
that the feeling of fleeing
hung in the air like incense
and shook everyone’s bones until they cried out,
that she gradually left it behind,
hidden among trains and poplars,
nailed forever between light and wind.
Alastair Reid (1926 -2014) was a poet, prose chronicler, translator, and traveler. Born in Scotland, he came to the United States in the early 1950s, began publishing his poems in The New Yorker in 1951, and for the next fifty-odd years was a traveling correspondent for that magazine. Having lived in both Spain and Latin America for long spells, he was a constant translator of poetry from the Spanish language, in particular the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. He published more than forty books, among them two word books for children, Ounce Dice Trice, with drawings by Ben Shahn, and Supposing..., with drawings by Bob Gill, both available from The New York Review Children’s Collection.
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