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Ode to Maize

Pablo Neruda

America, from a grain
of maize you grew
to crown
with spacious lands
the ocean foam.
A grain of maize was your geography.
From the grain
a green lance rose,
was covered with gold,
to grace the heights
of Peru with its yellow tassels.

But, poet, let
history rest in its shroud;
praise with your lyre
the grain in its granaries:
sing to the simple maize in the kitchen.

First, a fine beard
fluttered in the field
above the tender teeth
of the young ear.
Then the husks parted
and fruitfulness burst its veils
of pale papyrus
that grains of laughter
might fall upon the earth.
To the stone,
in your journey,
you returned.
Not to the terrible stone,
the bloody
triangle of Mexican death,
but to the grinding stone,
sacred
stone of your kitchens.
There, milk and matter,
strength-giving, nutritious
cornmeal pulp,
you were worked and patted
by the wondrous hands
of dark-skinned women.

Wherever you fall, maize,
whether into the
splendid pot of partridge, or among
country beans, you light up
the meal and lend it
your virginal flavor.

Oh, to bite into
the steaming ear beside the sea
of distant song and deepest waltz.
To boil you
as your aroma
spreads through
blue sierras.

But is there
no end
to your treasure?

In chalky, barren lands
bordered
by the sea, along
the rocky Chilean coast,
at times
only your radiance
reaches the empty
table of the miner.

Your light, your cornmeal, your hope
pervades America's solitudes,
and to hunger
your lances
are enemy legions.

Within your husks,
like gentle kernels,
our sober provincial
children's hearts were nurtured,
until life began
to shuck us from the ear.

Did I Redeem Myself?

From 'The Woman I Kept to Myself'

Julia Alvarez

Did I redeem myself, Mami? Papi?

Was I the native child you dreamed up

as you lay in the foreign bed you’d made

your first and failed exile in New York?

Did I excuse your later desertion,

leaving your friends behind to die? Did I

help to reframe that choice as sacrifice:

you gave your girls the lives they would have missed

growing up in a double tyranny

of patriarchy and dictatorship?

Did I redeem myself, my sisters, for those nights

I kept you up with Chaucer lullabies?

My love poems at your weddings? My calls

at midnight with a broken heart? And you,

dear lovers whom I mistook for husbands,

do you forgive me for forsaking you?

I heard—or thought I heard—a stronger call.

This love did prove the truest, after all.

And friends, can this be tender for your care?

Have I kept some of my promises here?

But harder still, my two Americas.

Quisqueya, did I pay my debt to you,

drained by dictatorship and poverty

of so much talent? Did I get their ear,

telling your stories in the sultan’s court

until they wept our tears? And you, Oh Beautiful,

whose tongue wooed me to service, have I proved

my passion would persist beyond my youth?

Finally, my readers what will you decide

when all that’s left of me will be these lines?