Cinco de Mayo

I just finished one of my many concurrent Clairefontaine grid-journals, which I started in April 2002, when we were taking our Mexican poetry class here at the UC Davis Arboretum. Looking through it, there’s a lot of poetry in there; Maria Melendez made us write a SONNET A DAY for a week. Sonnets are tough. It was a tough week.

She also introduced us in this class to the chant, believed to have been the earliest form of poetry. Francisco Alarcn, a poet who teaches here at Davis and who was shortlisted for California poet laureate that year, came and read some of his chants to us. I loved them. I wrote lots, including, I now see, the chant of the ground-squirrel sentry. (No mention there of genitalia, I assure you.)

Here are a couple of poems. One’s a chant, in Spanglish, a tribute to the people we see in the fields near us, working all the time, all the time, all the time. The second is in Spanish, written as I was reading lots of sonnets in Spanish (notably Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz). The poem talks about the blind lottery ticket sellers I walked past as a child in Madrid; they sang out in a resounding tenor that they had tickets to sell. (The Spanish lottery has, since its inception, devoted a large percentage of its profits to the blind; the “gordo” is the mind-boggling sum won only at the Christmas lottery.)

Growing What Sells

The wheat. The cows. The almonds. The plums.
The earth. La tierra. Trabajo. Our hands.
Los aos. The sweat. Sudando, we plough.
We water. We grow. Cultivamos. We pick.
The food. The earth. La tierra. The bounty.
The silos. The cows. La leche. The rain.
The sun. El sol. Sudando, we work.
The mortgage. The debt. Sudando, we worry.
The houses, the creeping. The vanishing farms.
Regulations. The debts. The cows, the poor wheat.
Las casas, the lawns. These have few regulations.
The turf that we grow, that we spray, it pays well.
If there’s no more food, don’t blame us: it’s demand.
We grow grass for your lawns, it’s no sweat: it’s our land.

Lotera

“El premio para hoy,” canta el ciego:
Un chillo que se extiende por la plaza
Por encima del ron del autobs
Circulndose. “El premio para hoy.”
Tono casi rabe llamando a la
Oracin, o an canto hebreo
Que se oan por aqu hace mil aos:
La splica del ciego nos promete
Ms que la maana soleada. Un
Boleto del azar, la vida,
Premio gordo: basta comprrnoslo.
O suerte desgraciada y ciega, que vas
premiando y castigando igualmente!
Por m, elijo la maana y el sol.