It’s National Poetry Month.

At first, I felt a little guilty about writing about a month dedicated to the word and it’s manipulation, especially after today’s earlier posts about the loss of two Latina lives. Pero then I thought about my own work as a poet. Si, Mala is a poet. For about as long as I have been involved in various forms of on the ground and online organizing I have written and performed (or spit as I like to say, since I’m not so ladylike). And for as long as I have been writing and reading, my poesia has been tied to my politics and my life. When I first began reading publicly, it was in the presence of other poets whose words were grounded in NYC Latino and POC urban politics. We wrote about (and still do) struggles with language and identity, the ugly realities and the beautiful shards of light.

Poetry is about working it all out. You let the words come and you put them on paper, on screen, or before an audience and then you let them go like a child, like movements. Poesia comes from where we are at at a specific moment and that’s what community building should be too, meeting peeps where they are at in a specific place and time, be that geographical, historical or economic time.

I invite all of our VivirLatino familia to share some of their favorite poems/poets. Amiga Hermana, Resist, reminded me on twitter that poems can be anything. So please do not be shy. Email us at info@vivirlatino.com and/or leave a comment below.

I’ll jump it off con las palabras of Puerto Rican poetisa

Julia de Burgos

Yo Misma Fui Mi Ruta / I Was My Own Path

I wanted to be like men wanted me to be:

an attempt at life;

a game of hide and seek with my being.

But I was made of nows,

and my feet level on the promissory earth

would not accept walking backwards

and went forward, forward,

mocking the ashes to reach the kiss

of new paths.

At each advancing step on my route forward

my back was ripped by the desperate flapping wings

of the old guard.

But the branch was unpinned forever,

and at each new whiplash my look

separated more and more and more from the distant

familiar horizons;

and my face took the expansion that came from within,

the defined expression that hinted at a feeling

of intimate liberation;

a feeling that surged

from the balance between my life

and the truth of the kiss of the new paths.

Already my course now set in the present,

I felt myself a blossom of all the soils of the earth,

of the soils without history,

of the soils without a future,

of the soil always soil without edges

of all the men and all the epochs.

And I was all in me as was life in me .. . .

I wanted to be like men wanted me to be:

an attempt at life;

a game of hide and seek with my being.

But I was made of nows;

when the heralds announced me

at the regal parade of the old guard,

the desire to follow men warped in me,
and the homage was left waiting for me.