Roadblock

By Rachel Hadas b. 1948 Rachel Hadas

Call me the bee buzzing in the museum.

The younger sister fussing through a house

still stiff with loss.

The meddling goblin in the mausoleum.

My dream: with three in the front seat, we drive

under a bridge and halt. A huge gray bus

blocks the whole road, including us,

the only travelers who are left alive.

It’s drizzling; the windshield wiper blades

busily gesture, yet we’re nearly blind.

You two seem not to mind

blank windows, pulled-down shades.

I mind. I want to get out and explore,

to move around

the deathly obstacle. “Don’t make a sound,”

you say. (Who are you?) “Don’t go near that door.”

Our mountain drive last month—that wasn’t dreamed.

We three again. We ran a dog down. I

alone looked back, alone let out a cry.

I saw it lying in its blood and screamed.

So tell me what these images portend.

Am I a noisy bird of evil omen

or just a person, apprehensive, human,

moving ahead, kid sister into woman,

stonewalled by death each time she rounds a bend?

Source: Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)

Biography

The daughter of renowned classical scholar Moses Hadas, whose early death she has said gave her a “premature sense of the yoking of love and loss,” Rachel Hadas has published numerous collections of poetry, essays, and translations. Kevin Walzer, an editor at WordTech Communications who published Hadas’s The River of Forgetfulness (2006), comments that “her work—steeped in her knowledge of classical Greek and Latin, formally . . .

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