Poem: i want to speak of unity - The New York Times

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Each of us carries a cord of hope through all our wandering days. Where it begins, when we found ourselves leaving home — so many homes; or when we arrived, when consciousness widened to possibilities of community — the cord grows stronger or frays. Juan Felipe Herrera’s magnificent new poems in “Every Day We Get More Illegal” testify to the deepest parts of the American dream — the streets and parking lots, the stores and restaurants and futures that belong to all — from the times when hope was bright, more like an intimate song than any anthem stirring the blood. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye

— i want to speak of unity that
indescribable thing
we have been speaking of since ’67 when I first stepped
into LA
with a cardboard box luggage piece I was distracted by you
your dances askew & somersaults the kind you see at
shopping centers
& automobile super sale events — the horns &
bayonets most of all
I wanted to pierce the density the elixirs of everything
something
like Max Beckmann did in that restaurant painting of
’37 or ’38 exiled
from Germany banned & blazing black jacket — that
everything
in a time of all things in collapse
that embrace that particular set of syllables of a sudden
attack
or just a breath of a song the one I would hear back in
the early ’50s
when I walked the barren earth with my mother &
father the sound
of One when Luz still lived & Felipe still parted the red
lands
& no one knew we existed in the fires the flames that
consume all of us
now

---

Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Her latest book is “Cast Away,” from Greenwillow Books. Juan Felipe Herrera traveled the nation from 2015 to 2017 as the United States poet laureate and wrote about it in “Every Day We Get More Illegal” (City Lights Publishers, 2020).

Illustration by R.O. Blechman

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