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LORNA DEE CERVANTES
"When you grow up as I did -- a Chican -- India in a barrio, in a Mexican neighborhood in California, welfare class -- you're not expected to speak. You're ignored. You're something in the periphery, emptying garbage cans or washing plates. You're not expected to speak, much less write."
Born in San Francisco's Mission
district of Native American and Mexican ancestry, Lorna Dee Cervantes discovered Shakespeare and the English Romantic poets in the houses her mother cleaned. As an adult, she has worked to put into language the once-wordless histories of Mexican Americans and especially Chican-Indias. She teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"Poet's Progress"
for Sandra Cisneros
I haven't been
much of anywhere,
books my only voyage,
crossed no bodies
of water, seen anything
other than trees change,
birds take shape -- like the rare
Bee Hummingbird that once hovered
over the promise of salsa
in my garden: a fur feathered
vision from Cuba in Boulder,
a wetback, stowaway, refugee,
farther from home than me.
Now, snow spatters its foreign
starch across the lawn gone
crisp with freeze. I know
nothing tropical survives
long in this season. I pull
the last leeks from the frozen
earth, smell their slender
tubercular lives, stand
in the sleet whiteout
of December: roots
draw in, threads of relatives
expand while solitude, the core,
that slick-headed fist of self, is
cool as my dog's nose and pungent
with resistance. Now when
the red-bellied woodpecker
calls his response to a California
owl, now, when the wound
transformer in the womb
slackens, and I wait
for potential: all
the lives I have
yet to name,
all my life
I have willed into being
alive and brittle with the icy
past. And it's enough now,
listening, counting the unknown
arachnids and hormigas
who share my love of less
sweeping. For this is what
I wanted, come to, left
alone with anything
but the girlhood horrors,
the touching, the hungry
leaden meltdown of the hours.
Or the future -- a round negation,
black suction of the heart's
conception. Save me
from a stupid life! I prayed.
Leave me anything but
a stupid life.
And that's poetry.
What do you risk in praying for "anything but / a stupid life"?
Questions
1. In "Poet's Progress" Lorna Dee Cervantes describes the course of her life as a poet. Where has she been? Where is she going?
2. What do the animals and plants in "Poet's Progress" tell us about the poet at the center of the poem?
3. According to "Poet's Progress," what is poetry? What is "a stupid life"?
4. What effects does the poet achieve by describing a Bee Hummingbird as "a wetback, stowaway, refugee"?
Activities
1. Keep a journal of your encounters with animals and plants, of all sorts. Note how these encounters stimulate or reflect your feelings and ideas.
2. Write your own "Poet's Progress" about yourself or a poet you admire.
3. Create a bulletin board entitled "And that's poetry." Let everyone contribute something -- a drawing, a photograph, a phrase, a poem, etc. -- until it is entirely covered.
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