Poetry, as a special language, is particularly suited for those special, strange, even mys terious moments when bits and pieces suddenly coalesce. These moments arrive with a sharp poignancy in the field, when the ethnographer, away from home and in a strange culture, has a heightened sense of the frailty of being human. In such a sense, poetry ap pears to be a way of communicating instances when we feel truth has shown its face. Fi nally, poetry, although a special manner of speaking, may in fact be closer to what it is to be human than more ordinary talk—given that we humans, that is, you and I, are not ordinary facts stored away in nature's warehouse.
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