Love Poem for Our Mothers

I want to write a love poem for my mother
and dress it in the sugar frosting flowers

she made with her hands as if by magic

I want to write a love poem for your mother

to say her child is beautiful and strong

in the world as more than just a song

or a stone encrusted silver memory

I want to write a love poem for my mother

to tell her all I did not say before or share

in those quiet moments on the telephone

before she found her way beyond the

hurt that tore so suddenly inside her

I want to write a love poem for your mother

over knitting and crochet like the iridescent

silk tie she once gave me when I went to cry

I want to write a love poem to my mother

with the hummingbird whir she left in

my chest as a permanent reminder to love

and love again

I want to write a love poem to them both

a poem that rings with the bright bells of

a birthday Valentine and a gathering of

artisan and healer women at an Eastside

carnival of love like whispers of kindness

a grateful poem that says in no uncertain way

that without each of them, neither one of us

would have ever known what it was like to

once have loved each other.

Día de los enamorados,

el amor y la amistad

2010

Roll Call Dispatch & Radio Days

The February 16th funeral services for maestro raúlrsalinas in South Osten near the campus of St. Edwards University where Raúl taught as an adjunct professor in media studies were met with chill winds, a cold, drizzling rain and finally a rainbow, a fitting signal that the poet had been lifted into the great hogan in the sky and declared a human being. The list of despondent and solemn mourners who offered music, sage, poems and prayer was long. Among those who paid their respects were: UFW's Dolores Huerta; poet and famed Royal Chicano Airforce founding father José Montoya; San Francisco-based writer Alejandro "Gato" Murguía; Dr. Louis Mendoza, who co-edited Telling Tongues: A Latin@ Anthology on Language Experience published jointly by Red Salmon Press and Calaca Press; artist/activist Jane Madrigal; Pocha and Victor Payan who are now coordinating the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center Cinefestival in San Antonio; director/actor Rodney Rodriguez; documentary filmmaker Andrea Melendez; playwright and poet Sharon Bridgforth; NOKOA Newspaper publisher Akwasi Evans; painter Anna Salinas; cinematographer Lee Daniel, documentary filmmaker Susanne Mason... the list goes on and on. Laura Varela is working on a documentary about "Tapón" as we speak and made her way north from San Anto to attend as did Victoria Garcia, another S.A. artist/administrator. The creative tide left in our mentor's wake was and is a tanglible gale force of energy that goes on. This week's national broadcast of Latino USA offers my own humble tribute to Raul. The radio essay is called "Death of a Poet."

Amorindio... descanse en paz, maestro raúlrsalinas

Llantos y lamentos y aullidos y un dolor profundo desde el mero corazón, because the world has lost a blazing warrior, a down crusader for human rights and social justice and a literary lion. Just a month or so shy of his 76th birthday, my mentor and honorary godfather and the vato who kept me off the streets and out of trouble for so many years during a troubled post-adolescence, one ex-pinto, self-described cockroach poet and the founder/owner of Resistencia Bookstore, author of Un Trip Through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions and so much more, raúlrsalinas caught the bus early this morning. The legendary poet, who shared the stage with Oscar Zeta Acosta, José Montoya, Ernesto Cardenal, Piñero, Pietri and a multitude of others took me on twenty-four years ago and put me to work. Dusting bookshelves, painting rooftop bookstore signs and loading boxes of books onto the back of a pick up for trips to the San Antonio Inter-American Bookfair where he introduced me literally to Luis Rodriguez, Dagoberto Gilb, Trinidad Sánchez and many others, I soaked up jazz monsters and read with a voraciousness that stemmed from his plain, matter-of-fact revolutionary stance. From Angela Davis and Leonard Peltier to Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, my South Austin residency at Resistencia, Casa de Red Salmon Press was all about the education I would never have gotten in the halls of academia. I was proud to lug around the jailhouse graphics department in a plastic file folder case. We ran together for ten years until I ventured out into the world as a reverse mojado in Matamoros, then a music flack for La Mafia in Houston and finally as a sometime wordsmith in East LA. The last time we spoke, a month before Christmas, he had not even the energy to give me my requisite regañada. Just a year before that, at a fundraiser tribute for him hosted by actor Jesse Borrego, he'd given me a serious tongue lashing over the fact that I'd let a good woman get away or run her off, rather. "Nephew, what did you do to her?" he'd asked with his traditional good-natured gruffness, the slight scolding implicit. I could only look away in shame and offer a nervous laugh while shrugging.

Raul spent many years in the prison system and thus became an engaged political activist. His transformation enabled my own eventual commitment to kids caught up in the juvenile justice system. It's ironic that his passing comes a week or so after my own introduction to the inside of a county jail complex and a troubling first hand glimpse at how that jail machine is built to break you down. Raul stood up. He wrote and he taught and he blessed us with his wisdom, a sage body of knowledge acquired through a lifetime of experience filtered through one of the keenest intellects I've ever encountered. His work on behalf of Native American rights and at-risk youth in detention facilities across the nation, his struggles against oppression and political censorship around the globe, and his gentle demeanor as a humble bookminder shall be heralded through the end of time. Adios, uncle. I'm a better human being for having known you and need you to know that your work will go on. It will continue far beyond those admiring liner notes for your first spoken word CD from Calaca Press, te lo prometo... La lucha continua.

Weekend Recap

What can you say about SoundEye? Held at Taper Hall on the USC campus, it was intimidating insofar as the gathering of poets had to compete with a Trojan game, so parking was beastly. Enough discussion about hermetic insularity vs. accessibility and transference. The reading, held in a small conference room/library filled with faculty work (T.C. Boyle's titles seemed to predominate along the section of shelving where I sat to get my SoundEye fill), was intense and aloof at the same time. I won't even shy away from saying flatly that some of poetry was breathtaking. Alfred Arteaga, recently out of the hospital, read from a book that came of a sojourn in Ireland in addition to work from Cantos and Fred Moten, author of In the Break: the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, revealed essences of a poet-philopsher who takes the work of writing seriously.

Equally urbane and riveting, Marisela Norte invited the boys, her male contemporaries in LA artes y letras, to read some of her work while she delivered a piece penned by each of them as an introduction. Sesshu Foster, Rubén Martínez and Michael C. Ford did her justice and the words blistered with innate fire and devotion. I bear witness, even if the residue of the late night before left me a might wee bit on the sedate side. One the three best Chicana poets in the country, Norte stalks the city on Metro buses and reveals the real LA in every line etched neatly along the pages of her notepads and composition books. Coincidentally, La Palabra featured a counterpart from across the cultural divide the following day. Steve Abee, in a vein similar to Norte, mines material from the street forward. His style is perhaps less subtle and distinguised by construction as muscular, run-on, free form prose, but the work converges on the same tender perspective. Ultimately, it is a take that doesn't skew the inherent ironies of life absorbed from a rolling perch ambling along the city's surface like blood cells in a body culled from a rainbow of angels.