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    Wild in the Plaza of Memory
    Wild in the Plaza of Memory
    Wild in the Plaza of Memory
    Ebook126 pages59 minutes

    Wild in the Plaza of Memory

    By Pamela Uschuk

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    About this ebook

    Blending the personal with the political, these poems explore the deleterious effects of adversity and trauma on a global scale, focusing on such subjects as immigration laws, environmental degradation, multinational corporate greed, and the effects of war on women and children. The poet makes unexpected connections between disparate things, drawing from wild nature for imagery while also passionately engaging the reader to become aware of injustice and suffering at home and abroad. The poems are crafted using lyrical language that is at once precise, figurative, and celebratory, creating a collection that is humanitarian and emotionally resonate.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWings Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2012
    ISBN9781609402105
    Wild in the Plaza of Memory
    Author

    Pamela Uschuk

    Human rights activist Pamela Uschuk’s seven poetry collections include Crazy Love (American Book Award) and Blood Flower. Translated into twelve languages, her work appears widely in Poetry, Ploughshares, and others. Awards include Best of the Web, Dorothy Daniels Award (National League of American PEN Women), prizes from Ascent, New Millenium & Amnesty International. Editor of Cutthroat, Truth to Power, and Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, Black Earth Institute Fellow, Uschuk lives in Tucson. She leads writing workshops at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and is featured in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day. She’s finishing her memoir, Of Thunderlight and Moon: An Odyssey Through Cancer.

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      Book preview

      Wild in the Plaza of Memory - Pamela Uschuk

      Root.

      WHAT CAME TRUE

      It is here. At a touch of my hand,

      The air fills with delicate creatures

      From the other world.

      ~ James Wright

      ODE TO FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA

      Federico, sometimes you come to me as a little rain

      straining up from the south, smeared

      with the scent of orange rind and blood.

      Smeared with rabbit blood frenzy, coyotes

      ring the house howling the hour

      the moon ticks like a gypsy watch

      above the pool where the heron sleeps.

      Where the heron dreams, a smear

      the size of the moon is actually a guitar

      moaning the syllables of your lost name.

      Federico, when you come to me, the unbearable

      longing of trees roots deeper in the sky, flies

      among stars like a comet in search

      of its dead twin. Federico the wind tonight is arctic

      silver, not green, not forever green,

      and I think how easy it is to die, skin basted

      with orange blossoms and loneliness

      as if loneliness was a horse a poet could break

      or deny. Tonight, you are the slivered silver moon

      ticking above cedar and sage that remember

      their roots in the olive groves of Andalusia.

      Green rind of death, how dare you spit

      out the syllables of such desire? Federico,

      some nights you fly through the window,

      the eye of a hawk on fire,

      black gaze gone to blood, gone

      to the ropey bones of moonlight,

      to guitars laughing in blue pines,

      to the wet bulls of passion,

      to the weft of love abandoned

      to oiled rifles in an olive grove

      on a sunny day before I was born. Did

      they so fear the delicacy of your hands?

      2011: THE YEAR OF THE METAL RABBIT

      for Roger Frank (1944-1972) and the Valenzuela brothers

      The forty-third anniversary of the TET Offensive

      and we are still burying evidence

      trip-wired by an enemy we cannot see.

      Is it change that breaks its frozen toes

      on morning’s door sill? I want to see

      what a metal rabbit looks like, a Humvee rattling

      a Kabul street or the hare of hunger

      uprooting rusty mortar casings

      in a valley west of Da Nang, where my first

      husband was ambushed by dragon fate, his stomach unstitched

      by machine-guns, a quick bayonet stab.

      Two days he dreamed between

      steaming earth and death’s scabbed hands

      swirling a bamboo stream he couldn’t reach

      before Medevac found him.

      He survived only three years, his Purple Heart

      unable to airlift him out of terror

      that strafed his constant fever to death.

      In D.C. we meet two Viet Nam vets,

      the Valenzuela brothers, Mexican Americans

      about to be deported because they can’t prove

      which side of the border they were born on.

      One of them wears the Bronze Star

      for valor on his decorated chest.

      Spider-white scars from Agent Orange devour his hands.

      He says he has no strength in them, cannot

      hold up the flag much longer, asks the gunmetal sky,

      Where is my Commander In Chief?

      We leave the aging vets in dress uniform,

      at attention in ice rain and begging justice

      from the sparse audience on the Capitol steps

      while Chinese exchange students snap souvenir photos.

      What changes will the Metal Rabbit bring

      clanking in on its armored back legs—

      such tough prey, invincible to hawk talon

      and Kalashnikovs—

      its multi-colored back

      snagged on the hooks of the inhumane, ears cocked

      for a compassionate mate.

      ON PIGEON MOUNTAIN: CITY OF ROCKS

      for Rick Jackson and Terry Harvey

      There are rocks that are the compressed vertebrae

      of turtles whose shells collapsed eons ago around fear.

      Fear can leak like radiation into the sea from a breached reactor

      some crack in concrete when the earth’s plates shift

      in Japan to consume cities and rocks who believed they were solid

      and real, and we learn there is no place on this planet

      or in space that is far removed. Everything can happen

      in the blink of a photon shot past Alpha Centauri. Sometimes my heart

      believes it is too far away from love.

      Then a friend turns

      to share water near huge rocks that flex like black vultures

      from the rattled hills of paradise. Some rocks open

      their sandstone jaws to the paws of foxes, fissures

      split deep as knife wounds in their mineral guts. We

      can’t see to their bottoms. Viewed from the moon,

      boulders the size of inflated elephants

      would be invisible as our footprints

      or the black rat snake bisecting our path, scintillating vector

      of darkness, its vision blurred by scales

      left from shedding skin, tongue fiery

      as a penstemon quick-sipping spore from breeze.

      This rock is as big as a garage and talks our ears off

      at dusk when its gray coat glisters

      like the rind of full moon or a TV screen

      where rescuers dig through dense strata of icy mud,

      wrenched metal, tsunami-splintered beams, screen

      that shifts scenes to Libyans blasted

      by the dictator’s bombs in their own streets.

      How can the battered boundaries

      of our minds take this in?

      Some boulders

      are strewn like

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