I have always loved CDs
Not the kind the world forgets
Not sitting buried in dusty glove compartments
But those who feel like a universe
Resting in the palm of your hand
In my father’s work truck
Rust along the edges
The tired static of the CD player
There was silence
Holding its breath.
And then the road became endless
Music filled the cab
Thick as incense
Our voice sank into it
Our fears dissolved into it
Our faith merged with it
For a moment, nothing was
But the hum of the engine’s flaws
And the things we’d discuss
Then the song collapsed
Silence filled the cab
Thicker than incense
I understood then
We never listened to it
We drowned in it
We hid in it
Slowly
But beautifully
Even now
When the world is quiet
I hear that disc spin
Not with music’s sighs
But with echoes that refuse to die
I wrote this poem to invite others to look at the small moments in life, those that seem meaningless in the moment, but carry such an emotional impact on our lives. I wanted to explore the themes of nostalgia, communication, and intimate silence. In my formative years, I did not have a close relationship with my parents; our family led very busy lives and sacrificed our relationships to survive as immigrants. The only time I had with my dad happened to be in his work truck at the end of the day.
But there was silence, the type of silence that gave your brain nowhere to hide, the type of silence that revealed our facade. And we put a CD to compensate for the loud silence. In that time, we talked about anything and everything. Using the music to shield ourselves from things we couldn’t say out loud… or in silence.
I tried making my writing process sound like a CD itself; it starts and gradually builds up, then collapses and leaves an echo behind. I wanted to make the poem nostalgic with a reflection of a forgotten past. I focused on sensory details like the rust of the truck, the static sound of the CD player, and the incense, all to try to make it feel like a distant memory. I used these in two senses, one of build-up and one of collapse. I also used extensive shifts in tone to try to plant an image of how it feels shifting between noise and quiet,
I was influenced majorly by my parents, who used to write many poems, mostly love poems, in their time. They told me to create a sense of nostalgia and to use a lot of imagery and metaphors to such an extent that they unravel feelings beyond what words can describe. They also told me to use the author Pablo Neruda to get examples of metaphors, although his poems are in Spanish.