My hand, of the five guardians and a single spillway
says: You are not needed here says: Here the stone and the woods are drunken says: There they cry out for you in the blazing plains says: There they seek out your jade skirt
Our mop of people our hands the colour of prickly pears
say: There the wind beaten in nine places say: There you will bathe, there you will cleanse the one born in your hand the one who lived in your hand
Not tomorrow. Not the day after tomorrow. Here, now.
Loosen your fists and let go of earth trees roots pylons palm tree highrise slippage bent cars Loosen your fists and drop elevators satellites glass pools clay waves down the incline the colours of cortex we never saw below electrified saturations dragged dogs waterlogged burnt hair offshoots of earth tidal pánuco tamesí xigüe guayalejo undone in refuges
It rains, our faces turn into boats our boots into barro mudslide encharcadas
Chubasco chabacano parra tecladeando cumbiamba desgarrar alter niesto nunca oscura fuga de
"Boland puts us where the speaker is, in space with what surrounds her—the present and often the past, mythologies and ideologies—as she is looking. She doesn’t just tell us what it’s like to look and live as a woman or mother or person outside of her country; she doesn’t just ask us to feel swept up in these feelings; instead, she gives us a physicalized, embodied experience."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"My home mountain range, the Colorado Sangre de Cristo, is an 80-mile fault-block uplift, with ten summits over 14,000 feet....Walking there for the last forty years has helped me learn that place is neither fixed nor purely spatial, but temporary and temporal, contingent and unstable, an intersection of forces I happen to encounter (and take part in) during my brief time on earth and briefer time as walker through a landscape. Here & now is a knot, and all its strands are moving."
