Sonnets and Salsa
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About this ebook
Carmen Tafolla
Carmen Tafolla is a poet, speaker, professor emeritus, State Poet Laureate of Texas, and author of more than thirty books, including Fiesta Babies, What Can You Do with a Paleta?, and What Can You Do with a Rebozo? (all available from Random House). Tafolla has received many awards, including the Americas Award, five International Latino Book Awards, and the Charlotte Zolotow Award. She travels to many places across the world, but always comes back to San Antonio, to a home filled with books and surrounded by trees, butterflies, and raccoons. Visit her website at carmentafolla.net.
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Sonnets and Salsa - Carmen Tafolla
Author
I.
Selected Salsas
The Storykeeper:
instructions from an historian
In the jarros, she says,
Look in the jarros.
The ones forgotten or shoved aside,
with a broken clay lip and color dulled by years
of hard use
and unmeditated abuse.
Search between the folds of rags,
the places no one else would look.
Often they are there, hiding.
Look in the garage,
in the dark corners.
Sometimes they are undiscovered, silent,
in the tecorucho sheds out back
or dumped in the alley,
wiped away from our lives, for the trash to take.
Others, hoarded like treasures the holder fears to reveal,
wrapped in a homemade colcha, in a wooden box
under the bed.
In the viejitos’ eyes, in the twilight of death,
you read their secret, the eyes point you to the spot, stamp
Remember
on the almost-forgotten box, and plead with you
to be the keeper
of the story.
To open the box, unwrap the colcha carefully,
save the scrawled story
protect it
as best you can.
Look in the places where ink does not show.
In the breaking voice
between the lines of a song.
Our history
is written in that song,
written on the voice,
sometimes written
on the heart.
Look at the hands.
The way the woman crosses herself when she passes
a certain field.
Everyone knows the story
of what happened there
late that night ninety years ago.
Everyone knows,
but it is not written.
The paragraphs of dangling bodies were too long, too ugly
to be written.
The sentences, like unfinished lives, too short
to make sense.
The letters of the words, spelled out, distorted,
incomprehensible,
like mutilation of body parts
that started out in belleza and truth.
Look at the way she holds the masa, with both hands,
protecting, feeling its warmth,
memorizing the moment, for just a second,
before it’s split apart,
into many tortillas
each to go their own way, some consumed rapidly,
some wasted, some disappeared,
never to be seen again.
In her gestures, her hesitations, her sigh of mourning,
lie our history.
Ask the whispers, she whispers,
breathed out in unguarded moments,
when the soul is too tired to think,
the body too worn down to hurt more,
in the numbness of the night,
when the father wrestles with the unwritten history,
pleading to save it, speak it, bury it,
staring at the pluma across the room,
avoiding the paper.
Singing the Indian chant of a story
he will not tell his children
yet:
‘They are too young.
Only 10.
Or 16.
Or 36.
Wait, Wait -
I fear for them to know
what those hate-filled others
did to my grandfather.
They are too young.
Perhaps I too at only 60
am too young
to know,
too old
to forget."
Ask the whispers, she chants, Learn the chant.
Sing it slow and privately
like he.
A sacred song
to be sung at only
sacred moments.
Look in the footwells of our steps,
the tablecorners rubbed smooth,
the marks on the walls where we have lived,
the fine and tired stitches in the clothing sewed and mended,
the careful fold of the shuck on the tamal,
the thumbprint curves of crepe paper flowers
trying to make ‘Canta’ out of ‘llores’.
Learn to read the eyes, the hands, the spine.
You must be like a detective, or a spy.
Subtle, unnoticed, unrelenting.
For they are out there.
Our stories.
To be read in the tracks of tears now made
into wrinkles on the face,
in the scars we carry with pride,
in the grocery list marked with crayon on a junk mail
funeral home advertisement, in the Western Union
telegrams of money sent home to México,
in the eviction notices sent people whose address
has stayed the same for one hundred and fifty years.
You must be persistent, courageous. Go quickly. Urgently.
Go into the dark corners.
Unveil our treasures from the attic.
Go find it, hear it, touch it, write it down.
This is how
we keep
our
history.
This is how
we also
keep
our
soul.
¡Sí se puede!
a sixty-two-year-old woman,
her back permanently humped,
bending to strike with a short-handled hoe,
groaning in pain each time she bends,
the sun leaning hard on her aching waist
(it was for her you spoke)
and for the fourteen-year-old boy
who leaves school every March and