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Juan Felipe Herrera is the recipient of a 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award for Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008).
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Selected Poems from
Half of the World in Light
A Certain Man • [Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way] • Crescent Moon on a Cat’s Collar • She Wants the Ring Like He Wants the Suit of Scars/But • 3:45 • June Journals 6-25-88 • Follow Różewicz • Water Water Water Wind Water • Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings |
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Crescent Moon on a Cat’s Collar
for Alurista
I come from a family of madmen and extravagant women.
My uncle, back in '26
wrote to the president of Mexico.
He accused him of murdering the potato eaters
by the millions.
So, they set him up for life
in a Goddamn Army hospital mental ward.
Another uncle
Xavier Levario got in with big business
making toys out of wood. I could have gone to France,
that’s where the art was, he said. But I joined everybody
in the States.
Armanda, my aunt whose hair has always looked like
gold dust,
a fleece,
owned the only swimming pool in the heart of Mexico City
near la Calle Uruguay.
My father drove a pink Ford down the main drag in Tijuana.
All the women loved him, no one has ever smiled sweeter.
My pocket is full of ancient coins.
I keep a silver box of African and Zapotec amulets and hair
near my bed, a tarnished sword and acrylics.
Lightning zig-zags like a dog’s tail
everytime I throw a stone in Southern Arizona.
I have fallen in wells and risen.
All my enemies, including the governors and the wardens,
keep away from my eyes and especially
from the rhythms swelling up through my feet and out
of the opal triumph of my voice |
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Copyright © 2008 by Juan Felipe Herrera. All rights reserved. |
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