Here I am my father working the sugar mill,
swimming in the valley swales. I am my mother
sweeping the dirt floor of her childhood home,
and selling oranges by the side of a road. Here,
my abuelo is the scent of night jasmine, my abuela
is the silvery dust settling on a moonlit orchard.
Here I'm the arms of guajiros swinging machetes
and puling up red potatoes. I am their breaths
singing their country songs, praising the land
or cursing it, keeping them alive. Here I've been
a taíno spearing fish and husking corn, a slave
drumming stories, a criollo counting doubloons
and pieces of eight. I've been a poet rhyming
and dreaming in Spanish, a yanqui buying
dictators, a bearded rebel asleep with his rifle.
Here, I watch the wind reborn, my eyes rise
with clouds taking to the sky like new souls.
I hear the rain gossiping, know the secrets
of how the red earth makes green guayabas
out of nothing, and I rest with the lakes
cupped in the hands of the green valleys' hills.
This is where I belong—among the blades
of sugarcane fields waving like wild manes,
the tropical sky sequined with twilight stars,
and banana leaves trembling in the breeze
like butterflies. For a moment or a lifetime
everything is mine, and yet all I can keep
is the bare, silent spaces between mountains,
the pause between the rustle of every palm.