Ode to Teachers

"Curandera" by Pat Mora (1985)

An earlier poem of Mora’s aimed at an older and more mature audience, “Curandera” presents a brief vignette illustrating a day in the life of a Curandera, a female shaman or native healer of Latin American origin. Like “Ode to Teachers,” the poem relies on a gradual narrative progression through the course of the day; and like “Ode to Teachers,” it shifts timescales as it moves from one stanza to the next. The Curandera rises from sleep, goes about her daily devotional acts, receives and offers counsel to townspeople, and ends the day dozing on her back porch. A central governing trope, or metaphor, of the poem is the figure of rhythm, and in particular the rhythms of everyday life in the desert. Mora deploys a repetition of phrases both to convey the iterative or repeated nature of the Curandera’s daily routines and also to mimic the underlying temporal patterns of social and natural life in the desert.

"Fences" by Pat Mora (1991)

Another largely anecdotal and descriptive poem from early in Mora’s career, “Fences” offers a sense of dramatic pacing rather different from both “Ode to Teachers” and “Curandera.” Here, narrative development sets up a sense of suspense reinforcing the dramatic impact of the final event: a memory of the speaker’s mother yelling at her daughter not to trespass on a beach reserved for tourists staying at the local hotel. The poem relates events through the perspective of the speaker’s childhood self, in part to convey a child’s difficulty in experiencing the social arrangement of racial and economic segregation as something natural. The figure, or metaphor, of the fence does double duty as both a boundary separating wealthy, predominantly white hotel patrons from mainly Latinx workers and as an aperture—an opening through which to look—for the speaker’s childhood perspective.

"Old Love" by Pat Mora (2010)

This poem, from the same collection of love poems written for teenagers in which Mora included “Ode to Teachers,” relates the speaker’s memory of the death of their aunt. The narrative centers around the speaker’s uncle’s expressive and dramatic grieving process. As with “Ode to Teachers,” Mora’s use of enjambed line breaks to alter the pacing of events does the lion’s share of the formal work, allowing the speaker to dilate or expand the uncle’s own narration of his memory of looking into his deceased wife’s eyes on New Year’s Eve and knowing she would die. In this respect, the poem’s title, “Old Love,” is reflected in the way Mora elongates the reader’s sense of time in the poem, thereby reinforcing the pathos of the uncle’s grief.