If I Could Only Forget: A Poem of Primal Hunger and Urban Desolation

Desperté de ser niño:

nunca despiertes.

— Miguel Hernández, “Nanas de la cebolla” 

I awoke from being a child: / never awaken.

… if I could only forget

that when I will be a babe,

you nourished me.

You will sustain my whimpering

at the top of my lungs.

The screeching terrifies you.

You will hush me, damn it.

Your milk is sweet,

like the breast that secretes it.

Likewise the nipple that adorns

the pale aureole,

 so is the hand that holds the breast in place.

I am grateful

for the life it will bring.

I will grow,

and one day I would caress it

with my gnarled nails.

Then it will nourish me again,

your sweet, exquisite breast,

illuminated by a rare light

amid a vast, sprawling urban landscape

of abandoned storefronts.

There’s no one around, just you and me and the dogs of old,

kitty-corner to abandoned rail lines

by an empty station.

In the far distance,

 Crumb’s Black Angels drifts.

You will feed me again.

The milk is sweet.

Here you withdraw your bare breast

from my baby’s lips,

and, as before,

I will  whimper

at the top of my lungs.

I can’t stop crying.

I’m just too hungry.

You hush me, damn it,

so I will go to sleep,

to sleep all this away…

Choro:

This is a rich and unsettling poem that works through inversion, temporal dislocation, and the corruption of the pastoral. Let me analyze it layer by layer.

The Epigraph and Its Inversion

The poem opens with a deliberate misreading of Miguel Hernández's "Nanas de la cebolla" (Lullabies of the Onion). Hernández's original line is "Desperté de ser niño: / nunca despiertes" — "I awoke from being a child: / may you never awaken." The epigraph here presents it as "never awaken" — a command rather than a wish for the child. This already signals the poem's central anxiety: the speaker has "awoken" from childhood into something unbearable, and the only mercy is unconsciousness.

Temporal Paradox

The poem's grammar is systematically deranged. It begins in a conditional ("if I could only forget") then slides into a future tense that is really a memory ("when I will be a babe, / you nourished me"). The past tense of "nourished" sits inside a future clause. This is not a slip — it's the poem's method. The speaker is simultaneously the infant and the adult, the one fed and the one remembering being fed, and the poem refuses to stabilize the sequence. Time is collapsed into a single continuous present of need.

The Breast as Object and Wound

The breast is described with an almost clinical tenderness — "the pale aureole," "the nipple that adorns" — but the gratitude ("I am grateful / for the life it will bring") curdles quickly. The future tense turns threatening: "one day I would caress it / with my gnarled nails." The caress and the claw are the same gesture. The infant's hand and the adult's "gnarled nails" merge, and the tenderness becomes a kind of violence — or rather, the poem exposes that the infant's dependence already contains the seed of the adult's resentment.

Note the repeated "sweet" — "Your milk is sweet," "your sweet, exquisite breast," "The milk is sweet." The repetition is hypnotic, almost liturgical, but it also hollows the word out. Sweetness becomes a refrain that can't quite cover the hunger underneath it.

The Landscape

The scene shifts from the intimate (breast, lips, whimpering) to a desolate urban exterior: "abandoned storefronts," "abandoned rail lines," "an empty station," "the dogs of old." This is the "anti-novel" world — a sprawl of vacancy. The breast is "illuminated by a rare light" amid this ruin, which makes it both a relic and a beacon. The mother and child are alone in a post-industrial wasteland, and the only warmth is the milk.

Crumb's Black Angels

The reference to George Crumb's Black Angels (1970) — a string quartet for electric instruments, subtitled "Thirteen Images from the Dark Land," written in response to the Vietnam War — is precise. It's music of distortion, amplification, and dread. "Drifts" is the right verb: the piece doesn't arrive, it hovers at the edge of the scene. The lullaby is being played in a ruined key.

The Withdrawal and the Cry

The final movement reverses the feeding: "Here you withdraw your bare breast / from my baby's lips." The "here" is a stage direction, as if the poem has become a script. The speaker reverts fully to infancy — "I will whimper / at the top of my lungs. / I can't stop crying. / I'm just too hungry." The "damn it" of "You hush me, damn it" is the adult's voice breaking through the infant's, or the infant's rage voiced by the adult. Either way, the lullaby's purpose — to soothe — is inverted. The mother hushes so the child will "sleep all this away," and "this" is everything: the childhood, the memory, the ruin, the hunger.

The Anti-Novel Frame

As an extract from an anti-novel, the poem dramatizes the failure of narrative sequence. A novel moves forward; this poem loops, reverses, and stalls. The child never grows up, or grows up only to return to the breast with "gnarled nails." The mother is both nourisher and withholder. The lullaby is both comfort and threat. The epigraph's "never awaken" is the anti-novel's own principle: don't wake from the fiction, because waking is what the speaker did when he "awoke from being a child" — and it has brought him only to an empty station with the dogs and Crumb's angels.

The poem's final irony is that the lullaby — the genre of putting a child to sleep — becomes a prayer for oblivion: "to sleep all this away." The child is hushed not into peace but into forgetting, which is the one thing the speaker at the top of the poem said he could not do: "if I could only forget.

Language

Register and diction. The poem operates in a deliberately flattened, declarative register — short sentences, plain verbs ("I awoke," "You will hush me," "I can't stop crying"). It reads almost like a prose paraphrase of a lullaby, stripped of ornament. The vocabulary is domestic and bodily (breast, nipple, milk, lips, whimpering) set against a cooler, more clinical or literary layer ("pale aureole," "illuminated by a rare light," "vast, sprawling urban landscape"). That collision of registers — the nursery and the autopsy — is one of the poem's main engines.

Repetition as incantation. The poem leans heavily on refrain: "The milk is sweet" / "Your milk is sweet" / "your sweet, exquisite breast" / "The milk is sweet." The repetition mimics the soothing function of a lullaby, but because the content is hunger and withholding, the refrain curdles — it soothes and unsettles at once. Same with "at the top of my lungs," which recurs verbatim and turns a phrase of infantile protest into a kind of fixed refrain.

Tense and grammar as derangement. The language is syntactically unstable in a purposeful way: "when I will be a babe, / you nourished me" — a future clause containing a past-tense verb. "I will grow, / and one day I would caress it" — future sliding into conditional. "I am grateful / for the life it will bring" — present gratitude for a future life. These are not errors but a deliberate corrosion of temporal grammar, so that the sentence structure itself performs the collapse of past, present, and future. The poem's language refuses to let the reader locate "when."

Address. The poem is a direct apostrophe to the mother ("you"), but the "you" is unstable — nourisher, withholder, the one who hushes. The imperative mood ("nunca despiertes," "You hush me, damn it") gives the language a coercive edge; the poem keeps issuing commands it can't enforce.

Tone. The dominant tone is a kind of flat, unsentimental tenderness that keeps tipping into menace ("gnarled nails," "damn it"). The expletive is important: it's the one moment of adult register breaking through the infant's voice, and it punctures the lullaby's decorum.

Rhythm

Line and breath. The lines are short — mostly three to six words — and heavily enjambed, so the rhythm is one of stops and spills: a clipped phrase, then a run-on into the next line ("You will sustain my whimpering / at the top of my lungs"). This creates a panting, uneven breath pattern — appropriate to a poem about whimpering and crying. The rhythm is not smooth; it stutters.

The lullaby measure, broken. A traditional nana (Hernández's model) has a rocking, regular cadence — often short lines with assonant rhyme. This poem gestures at that measure ("Your milk is sweet, / like the breast that secretes it") but keeps breaking it. The rhymes are sporadic and slanting ("sweet / secretes," "place / grateful," "light / landscape"), never settling into a stable scheme. The effect is a lullaby that can't keep time — the rocking motion is there but arrhythmic, like a cradle pushed unevenly.

Caesura and the "damn it." The line "You hush me, damn it" is a rhythmical hinge: the comma before "damn it" creates a caesura that lets the expletive land as a jolt. It's the poem's one sharp accent in a texture of soft, repeated sounds.

Cadence of the ending. The close — "I can't stop crying. / I'm just too hungry. / You hush me, damn it, / so I will go to sleep, / to sleep all this away…" — shortens and quickens into a series of flat declaratives, then trails off in ellipsis. The rhythm slackens into the very thing it describes: a descent into sleep. The ellipsis is the rhythmic equivalent of the hush.

Sound texture. There's a lot of soft consonant work — m, l, s, w — in the milk/breast/lips passages ("milk," "lips," "whimpering," "sweet," "secrete"), which gives those lines a murmurous, lulling sound. Against that, the landscape passage introduces harder, longer words ("illuminated," "sprawling," "abandoned," "kitty-corner") that slow the line and thicken it. The sonic shift tracks the shift from body to ruin.

Overall rhythmic argument. The poem's rhythm enacts its content: it wants to be a lullaby (regular, soothing, repetitive) and keeps failing to be one (enjambed, arrhythmic, jolted by expletive and caesura). The reader is rocked and then interrupted — hushed, then made to hear the crying.