Every day
I die a little bit in east Oakland
Every day
A little bit in a prison cell
Every day
A little more on the border
Every day
I go farther and father away
Dying here and there
In the valley in the fields
In the warehouse packing vegetables,
I die a little bit in schools,
on the street corner selling skills, sex or
handmade tamales, flowers, aguas frescas, nescafés, begging, Every…
to international human rights day:
Human rights day is
the day
when you
can be fully human,
imperfect,
immigrant,
imbecilic,
important,
impotent
to stop the U.S. disaster,
immune
to the past,
immured
with the possibilities
of liberation,
human liberation,
in the new day.
When indigenous indios
are
The People of the Earth
The original human
The human emblem of humanness
When migrants
are…
Mis rodillas
besan a la tierra
y abrazo
al espacio despacito
en mi carrera sin rumbo
mis labios te besan
y en torno besan a todos y todas.
Por tus labios
bebo la lluvia
Por los mios
el lodo
Lluvia
lodo
labios
vida
a carrera
despacito
sin mas rumbo que encontrarte
*
Rain
My knees
kiss the earth
and embrace
space slowly
in my rush nowhere
My lips kiss
and in doing so kiss everyone. Through…
Miracles are hard work: because breathing, because calmness, because conscientiousness is required. That is how Vallecitos appeared in Oakland, where I lived.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a letter arrived at our offices in Oakland offering a scholarship to one of us at the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to participate in the first-ever group to go on a fifteen-day retreat at the…
In 1948, maybe 1953, certain earlier, my brother Gilberto, when he was a 11 or 12 year old member of our migrant farmworker family that had travelled north and landed in Yakama lands to work in the fields, met White Swan. White Swan was then old, very old, deep in the winter season of his life. White Swan’s face was so wrinkled, crevasses, ravines, rivulets, rivers etched into his face.
I know this man, White Swan.
As a child he would visit me,
talk stories,
bemoan the losses
and the winterless years,
and smoke sweet grass in an aged pipe.
He would rub down the old horse
that lived in the field next door to our migrant camp.
The horse loved the handfuls
of sweet grass
he and I would pull
from the ground and feed to his hungering mouth,
ribs protruding, neighing like a colt. Wh…
