Flowers For Socrates

Hispanic Heritage Month (annually in the U.S. from September 15 to October 15) is an acknowledgement of the many contributions to the culture, intellectual enrichment and economic prosperity of the U.S. made by Americans whose families came here from Central and South America.  

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by Nona Blyth Cloud

“Poetry is a call to action and it also is action. Sometimes we say, “This tragedy, it happened far away. I don’t know what to do. I’m concerned but I’m just dangling in space.” A poem can lead you through that, and it is made of action because you’re giving your whole life to it in that moment. And then the poem — you give it to everyone. Not that we’re going to change somebody’s mind — no, we’re going to change that small, three-minute moment. And someone will listen. That’s the best we can do.”
……………………………………..— Juan Felipe Herrera 

Juan Felipe Herrera (1948 – ), the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States and son of Mexican immigrants, grew up in the migrant fields of California.

mi·grant – ˈmīɡrənt/

adjective — 1. migrating, especially of people; migratory.
noun — 2. a person or animal that migrates.
3. Also called migrant worker,  a person who moves from place to place to get work, especially a farm laborer who harvests crops seasonally.

The bland descriptions in the dictionary leave out the long hours of back-breaking work under blazing summer sun, the exposure to poisonous chemicals, the unrelenting poverty which makes everything uncertain and hard to come by that people with steady work can and do take for granted.

Juan Felipe Herrera has never forgotten. Instead, he has brought it with him unto a national stage where he can share all that it has taught him. It’s been a long journey, another kind of migration.

Exiles

and I heard an unending scream piercing nature.
    — from the diary of Edvard Munch, 1892

At the greyhound bus stations, at airports, at silent wharfs
the bodies exit the crafts. Women, men, children; cast out
from the new paradise.

They are not there in the homeland, in Argentina, not there
in Santiago, Chile; never there in Montevideo, Uruguay,
and they are not here

in America

They are in exile: a slow scream across a yellow bridge
the jaws stretched, widening, the eyes multiplied into blood
orbits, torn, whirling, spilling between two slopes; the sea, black,
swallowing all prayers, shadeless. Only tall faceless figures
of pain flutter across the bridge. They pace in charred suits,
the hands lift, point and ache and fly at sunset as cold dark
birds. They will hover over the dead ones: a family shattered
by military, buried by hunger, asleep now with the eyes burning
echoes calling Joaquín, María, Andrea, Joaquín, Joaquín, Andrea

en exilio

From here we see them, we the ones from here, not there or across,
only here, without the bridge, without the arms as blue liquid
quenching the secret thirst of unmarked graves, without
our flesh journeying refuge or pilgrimage; not passengers
on imaginary ships sailing between reef and sky, we that die
here awake on Harrison Street, on Excelsior Avenue clutching
the tenderness of chrome radios, whispering to the saints
in supermarkets, motionless in the chasm of playgrounds,
searching at 9 a.m. from our third floor cells, bowing mute,
shoving the curtains with trembling speckled brown hands. Alone,
we look out to the wires, the summer, to the newspaper wound

in knots as matches for tenements. We that look out from
our miniature vestibules, peering out from our old clothes,
the father’s well-sewn plaid shirt pocket, an old woman’s
oversized wool sweater peering out from the makeshift kitchen.
We peer out to the streets, to the parades, we the ones from here
not there or across, from here, only here. Where is our exile?
Who has taken it?

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