Martín Espada

Letter to My Father

October 2017

You once said: My reward for this life will be a thousand pounds of dirt
shoveled in my face. You were wrong. You are seven pounds of ashes 
in a box, a Puerto Rican flag wrapped around you, next to a red brick 
from the house in Utuado where you were born, all crammed together 
on my bookshelf. You taught me there is no God, no life after this life, 
so I know you are not watching me type this letter over my shoulder.

When I was a boy, you were God. I watched from the seventh floor
of the projects as you walked down into the street to stop a public
execution. A big man caught a small man stealing his car, and everyone 
in Brooklyn heard the car alarm wail of the condemned: He’s killing me. 
At a word from you, the executioner’s hand slipped from the hair 
of the thief. The kid was high, was all you said when you came back to us.

When I was a boy, and you were God, we flew to Puerto Rico. You said: 
My grandfather was the mayor of Utuado. His name was Buenaventura.
That means good fortune. I believed in your grandfather’s name. 
I heard the tree frogs chanting to each other all night. I saw banana 
leaf and elephant palm sprouting from the mountain’s belly. I gnawed 
the mango’s pit, and the sweet yellow hair stuck between my teeth. 
I said to you: You came from another planet. How did you do it? 
You said: Every morning, just before I woke up, I saw the mountains.

Every morning, I see the mountains. In Utuado, three sisters, 
all in their seventies, all bedridden, all Pentecostales who only left 
the house for church, lay sleeping on mattresses spread across the floor 
when the hurricane gutted the mountain the way a butcher slices open 
a dangled pig, and a rolling wall of mud buried them, leaving the fourth
sister to stagger into the street, screaming like an unheeded prophet
about the end of the world. In Utuado, a man who cultivated a garden 
of aguacate and carambola, feeding the avocado and star fruit to his 
nieces from New York, saw the trees in his garden beheaded all at once 
like the soldiers of a beaten army, and so hanged himself. In Utuado, 
a welder and a handyman rigged a pulley with a shopping cart to ferry
rice and beans across the river where the bridge collapsed, witnessed 
the cart swaying above so many hands, then raised a sign that told 
the helicopters: Campamento los Olvidados: Camp of the Forgotten.

Los olvidados wait seven hours in line for a government meal of Skittles
and Vienna sausage, or a tarp to cover the bones of a house with no roof,
as the fungus grows on their skin from sleeping on mattresses drenched 
with the spit of the hurricane. They drink the brown water, waiting 
for microscopic monsters in their bellies to visit plagues upon them. 
A nurse says: These people are going to have an epidemic. These people 
are going to die. The president flips rolls of paper towels to a crowd 
at a church in Guaynabo, Zeus lobbing thunderbolts on the locked ward 
of his delusions. Down the block, cousin Ricardo, Bernice’s boy, says 
that somebody stole his can of diesel. I heard somebody ask you once
what Puerto Rico needed to be free. And you said: Tres pulgadas 
de sangre en la calle: Three inches of blood in the street. Now, three 
inches of mud flow through the streets of Utuado, and troops patrol 
the town, as if guarding the vein of copper in the ground, as if a shovel
digging graves in the back yard might strike the ore below, as if la brigada
swinging machetes to clear the road might remember the last uprising.

I know you are not God. I have the proof: seven pounds of ashes in a box 
on my bookshelf. Gods do not die, and yet I want you to be God again. 
Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll 
of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face.
Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked
sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart. 

I promised myself I would stop talking to you, white box of grey grit. 
You were deaf even before you died. Hear my promise now: I will take you 
to the mountains, where houses lost like ships at sea rise blue and yellow
from the mud. I will open my hands. I will scatter your ashes in Utuado.

Christina Starobin

Fast food store: for rent
Big white rhododendron still
open for business

Note: The following are song lyrics. To listen to Louise Dessertine singing this song go to https://www.reverbnation.com/louisedessertine/song/30160972-i-am-of-water

*   *   *   *   *

Louise Dessertine
     

April, 2013

I am of water, tears run down my face
          Carry in their wake sadness and regret
          Drops on the window trickle away
          I am of water, tears and I are kin

I am of water, was sired by a storm
          It poured and howled on that fateful night that I was born
          Playful vengeance from above,
          I am of water, the rain and I are kin

I am of water, the ocean is my mother
          She sings an ancient lullaby, watchful of my slumber
          As she has always done and will do forever
          I am of water, the sea I are kin

I am of water, mighty clouds my father
          White and muscular tumbling bye
          Mist conceals a warrior’s cry—Mist conceals a warrior’s cry
          I am of water, clouds and I are kin

A parched man walks for days to reach a wretched creek
A droplet in his throat, moves him to speak
Brings life to his weary eyes, a tear runs down his cheek
For many a thousand years women sing and bear
An elixir that springs out of nowhere
Their voices crossing deserts to a parched man in despair

I am of water, my sisters, so many lakes
          Rivalling the vanity of the moon and sun
          My brothers, raging rivers, forever on the run
          I am of water, currents and I are kin

I am of water, small glass in my hand
          Raise it to the light, it glitters teasingly
          Bring it to my lips, the whole world enters me
          I am of water, the world and I are kin.
     

Blood/Lines

Flying economy class 
over the endless ocean once known
as the Middle Passage,
three-abreast neighbors complain in grumping harmony
about crowding, poor food, and the miseries
of six hours
aloft.

First-class in the cabin above
dine with the cutlery and politesse
of their ancestors, the financiers
of Triangular Trade,
boasting of America.
     

Lauren Schmidt

In Defense of Poetry

[Monmouth Neighborhood Housing, Monmouth County, New Jersey]

To you who say

poetry is a waste of ten homeless mothers’ time—
that I should correct their grammar,
and spelling, spit-shine their speech
so it gleams, that I should suck their tongues
and spew what you say is snakebite poison,
that I should set a red bucket full of Yes, Miss,
Thank You, and Whatever you say, Miss
on these mothers’ heads, fill that bucket
heavy, and tell them how to tip-toe to keep it
steady, that I should give them something
they can use, like diapers, food, or boots—

I say

you’ve never seen these ten women lower
their faces over poetry, as if ready for a lover
to slip his tongue between their lips, or
sip a thin spring of water from a fountain.

Robert Gibbons

the confiscation act

We understand the need to protect your own,
but there is a need to protect the rights
of all people. The people given equality
under the same constitution as everyone,
not a rote textbook theory, wrapped in rhetoric
and political jargon, so we can understand.
     
We can understand your use of protection
not intimidation, and this is not always visible
under the indivisible as we were told.
     
We can understand the need to protect your own
our bodies are not shooting range,
Not a Wild West movie used for folly
with hidden internal demarcation
the separation of black and blue.
     
We do believe in you
your method a strain antique
left over from a country sheriff
like so many above the supreme law
there is a higher justice mired
in consequence
given the past and the shield
as a mask there are a few.
     
The finest, the thin line
between life and death
give us our humanity back
our shell-shock witnesses
our frames and pay out
our whistle blowers and
Jim Crow.

Daniela Gioseffi

Mother Gaia

     
We’ve seen Her from outer space,
one big blooming woman.
We’re all born out of Her sapphire globe,
gleaming with frothy white waves and browns and greens
of forest and farmlands. When we saw Her
from outer space, life recognized life.     
     
She emerged flying from the sun’s explosion,
spun Herself into roundness to rotate endlessly,
journeying round the sun. Primal being without mouth, legs,
arms, or genitalia, she sails round the sun, spinning us
through days into sleep-filled nights. Her moon
creates tides on Her watery surface. Hospitable regions
of Her lands and seas birthed many organisms and, finally,
the ones with consciousness: we who issued from Her,
we individuals of Her global community, we– all of us–
     
Her children, dependent upon Her atmospheric balance
and photosynthesis fostering multitudinous varieties
of consumable vegetation. Spewing lava, molten glass
from sand, burning, acrid, smoking,
     
Gaia, it seemed, had no future. Who would have thought
that from Her roundness so many beings would be born?
Who could have guessed that from Her flaming hot magma
forests, cities, songs, art, poetry, longings would be born?
     
Please come be Her celebrant with me, hope with me that our children,
born of Her womb, will live with Her breath, breathing with Her trees
in symbiotic balance, bathing in Her cleansed waters, tranquilly together,
     
Earthlings suckled by Her full-breasted bounty
of brown-gray earth and blue-green waters–
Mother Gaia, our only teardrop of love and laughter,
afloat in cold dark space.     

Gil Fagiani

The Black  Hand  II

2/7/18

Mom told me about the bands of Italian thugs in Greenwich Village that extorted money from their poor co-nationals as soon as they started to work or open a small business. How Lieutenant Joe Petrosino, New York City’s first Italian-American police officer, began to succeed in defeating the Black Hand, until gunned down in Palermo where he planned on exterminating the organization at its very roots. Today I look at my left hand, blackened by the continuous sticking of needles to provide the blood work and IVs for my life and death struggle against leukemia. Mamma, who are the names of my enemies: The Devil, Satan, Lucifer, “undisclosed environmental factors,” and who is my Joe Petrosino, pledging to destroy them?
     

From the Public

Your helicopter scorches the White House lawn.

We, the citizens, haul water,

bring love to the grass blades.

We are necessary when you

stand tall in your title,

impose your shadow over the landscape,

manipulate serene sunrays

with your jackhammer presence.

We, the citizens, supply nutrients

for greens to flourish

even when soil has been contaminated,

turned to cinder and ash.

*   *   *   *   *

Strategy

Demagogues step all over truth

to arrive at lies.

They manipulate lies

into mirages that seem true

but turn out to be tricks, falsehoods.

They succeed with such tactics

when sheep are willing to be sheep,

when sleepwalkers agree

to stride onto the streets

while keeping their eyes closed.

Margaret R. Sáraco

Thoughts on the Day the Canadian Immigration Site Crashed 
During an American Presidential Election of Epic Proportions

I hear there may be an inn open
in Nova Scotia near a rocky cliff
a few kilometers from Annapolis Royal
alongside the Evangeline Trail
where Acadians, British,
Scottish and Black Loyalists
battled, lived and died for control of this
newfound place.

A graveyard marks the spot
where spilled blood soaked the earth
in a province where street signs in English and Gaelic,
point the way from Pugwash to Grand-Pré
this place (re)discovered by expats
who venture from different soil
and see in their new homeland, their land
never forgotten.

Call if you like, at the inn, someone may be there.

Katharine Beeman

On the shelf, a trilogy

after reading Che, my brother by Juan Martín Guevara and Taking the arrow out of the heart by Alice Walker

I

Books

In the glow
of an after reading,
we sign books,
he, with all love
I, in love and struggle
for solidarity, friends, a poem.

Mine speaks of defeating imperialism,
his of winning peace
both strangers
in this land we chose,
cherishing that right.

I remember 1970,
the War Measures Act:
manuscripts and books on shelves
trucked off by men in dirty boots -
again -
less than ten
short long years
after booty seized by Padlock cops
in the Grande noirceur of ‘54
was torched

My home land security:
the books
stay on the shelf.
Theirs:
our nightmare,
calls us to account –

What do you mean - love?
How long have you associated with…?

To them perceived a danger
this innocent love,
each a danger to the other
found on shelves
when the barbarians come.

2004

II

Love’s dialogue

There are some who think:
to honour a book
leave it pristine,
wouldn’t dream of
underlining
bracketing
annotating,
conversing by pen or pencil
with the author;
and heaven forbid a drop
of wine
or chorizo stained
finger tip
touch a page,
or a corner bend.
Others of us (Che and Fidel as well) know:
a beloved book
is like our childhood
stuffed bear -
fur worn off,
an ear gone,
a mismatched button eye
testimony to
love’s dialogue.

2019

III

The trouble with books

In the 21st century
the trouble with books,
is their cost
and their weight,
whereas I would buy them
sow them like seeds,
blow them dandelion-like
from one end
of Our America
to the other.

2019

*   *   *   *   *

The Kiss

Always,
in the morning
afternoon
whenever,
remember
-the kiss-
because it might be
the last
And maybe
you won’t
remember
that exact kiss,
among so many,
but you’ll remember
-always-
you
shared it

2019