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?

*****

Rachel Hadas writes: ” ‘Roadblock’ is an older poem, inspired by a visit to my sister and her then husband  years ago.  Our drive, and running over the dog really happened, as did the dream…but which came first?  And another question: would I have remembered either the car accident or the dream had I not written them into a poem?  Dreams still figure often in my poems.  And the fact that I’ll always be a younger sister, while it doesn’t get mentioned all that frequently, is a permanent feature of my consciousness that probably works its way into many of my poems however subliminally. The bee buzzing: my sister once complained that going to a museum with me was like going to a museum with a bee, a comment I’d forgotten until rereading this poem brought it back.  And those “blank windows, pulled-down shades”: doesn’t poetry often strive to pull the shades up?”

‘Roadblock’ is collected in ‘Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems’ (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)

Rachel Hadas’s recent books include Love and Dread, Pandemic Almanac, and Ghost Guest. Her translations include Euripides’s Iphigenia plays and a portion of Nonnus’s Tales of Dionysus. Professor Emerita at Rutgers-Newark, where she taught for many years, she now teaches at 92Y in New York City and serves as poetry editor of Classical Outlook. Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and an award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.

Photo: “Bus Crash at Ladprao-Chokchai4” by isriya is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.