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.