The Island Within
by Richard Blanco
for Ruth Behar
I’m still thinking about your porch light
like a full moon casting a foggy halo
in the frigid air last night, the bare oaks
branching into the sky like nerve endings
inches away from the frozen stars,
the pink gables of your Victorian home
protesting yet another winter for you
captive in Ann Arbor as you practice
mambo by the fireplace. I’m following
your red-velvet shoes to conga beats
and bongo taps taking your body, but
not your life, from the snow mantling
your windows outside, 1,600 miles
away from Cuba. I’m tasting the cafecito
you made, the slice of homemade flan
floating in burnt sugar like the stories
you told me you can’t finish writing,
no matter how many times you travel
through time back to Havana to steal
every memory ever stolen from you.
You’re a thief anyone would forgive,
wanting only to imagine faces for names
chiseled on the graves of your family
at Guanabacoa, walk on Calle Aguacate
and pretend to meet the grandfather
you never met at his lace shop for lunch,
or pray the Kaddish like your mother
at the synagogue in El Vedado, stand
on the steps there like you once did
in a photo you can’t remember taking.
I confess I pitied you, still trying to reach
that unreachable island within the island
you still call home. I thought I was done
with Cuba, tired of filling in the blanks,
but now I’m not sure. Maybe if I return
just once more, walk the sugarcane fields
my father once cut, drive down the road
where my mother once peddled guavas
to pay for textbooks, sit on the porch
of my grandmother’s house, imagine her
still in the kitchen making arroz-con-leche—
maybe then I’ll have an answer for you
last night when you asked me: Would you
move to Cuba? Would you die there?
Richard Blanco is the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in US history—the youngest, first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. Born in Madrid to Cuban-exiled parents and raised in Miami, the negotiation of cultural identity and place characterize his body of work, including three poetry collections (Looking for the Gulf Motel, Directions to the Beach of the Dead, and City of a Hundred Fires); and two memoirs (The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood and For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey). The University of Pittsburgh Press has published commemorative chapbooks of One Today, Boston Strong, and Matters of the Sea, the poem he wrote and presented at the historic reopening of the US Embassy in Havana. Blanco’s many awards include the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Thom Gunn Award, and a Lambda Literary Award for Memoir. He is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, a Phi Beta Kappa Alumnus Member, and has received honorary doctorates from Macalester College, Colby College, the University of Rhode Island, and Lesley University. In 2015, The Academy of American Poets named him its first Education Ambassador.
“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Coalition member Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present ten poems in March that engage with this year’s theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” The poems in this project were curated by Francisco Aragón & Emma Trelles.
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