TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

“Que Sera Sera” is a song I remember my mother singing when I was small. Which is fitting, as the song opens with these words: “When I was just a little girl I asked my mother what will I be.”

I remember part of the chorus well: “Que Sera Sera, whatever will be, will be, the future’s not ours to see.”

“Que será, será” sounds like a borrowed Spanish phrase, but is technically grammatically incorrect. Properly, it would be “lo que será, será.” The version we know today actually traces back to a sixteenth-century heraldic motto, adopted by English aristocrats who dropped the pronoun.

By the time Jay Livingston and Ray Evans put it into the song, penned at Paramount Studios’ request for a new Hitchcock movie, the phrase had already become a common English expression – albeit with a grammatical quirk. Decades later, the phrase means so much more than its literal translation into English, in part because of its cultural associations, and in part because of its place between languages.

As we often see in poems like today’s, language is elastic, adaptable, able to accommodate possibility and complexity.

ode to the afternoon
by Zeina Hashem Beck

my friend tells me she’s been running
in the cemetery in the afternoon
she calls it just-a-garden-really
first i am afraid & then i am afraid
everything is cemetery & garden
my late uncle’s flower shop
my daughter learning to fold a paper into a boat
sea salt marriage dawn old french music
this vertical line digging deeper
into my forehead every morning
that bicycle in the city tied to a street post
with flowers & a note to the girl who rode it


when i was a little girl i wanted to bury the afternoon
when longing was long & my parents slept & slept 
i stood in the corridor & repeated i i i i i  until i
flickered in & out of myself some days i even 
threatened to fling my body from the balcony until
my brother with such calm looked at me 
dangling from the railing my head thrown back
& explained you don’t own your soul
it belongs to God only He can decide


i stood in the corridor i stood on the balcony
i stood in the desolate afternoon & repeated
because what is repetition
if not a question the way mom every day
with her hair dryer with her grocery list
with her buying this shawl & that
is asking what have i done what have i done


the book says we will see clearly 
when the drunkenness of death falls upon us
my uncle saw a man & a woman
standing by his hospital window 
& asked his wife who they were 
my father with his prayer beads 
with his cigarette gestured to the driver
taking my uncle to his grave
to circle back & pass
by his flower shop my father
with his few words said 
one last time so he
by he  my father meant both
his brother & himself


my uncle taught me to sing que sera sera
he said say it what will be will be
i still dread the afternoon & still ask 
will i be pretty will i be missed 
& i still haven’t been 
to his grave but have driven
past his flower shop again & again & again
the way on the night he died i drove beneath bridges
& saw him on each one & waved

"ode to the afternoon" by Zeina Hashem Beck, from O, © 2022 Zeina Hashem Beck. Used by permission of the poet.