I know I am behind…blame mami’hood and Spring Break. Pero maybe that’s why I am drawn this to las Chicana fore(co)madres. They have been calling to me lately.

New Mexican Confession (an excerpt)

Upon Reading Whitman fifteen years later. Jemez Springs, 1988

by Cherríe Moraga

II
Like a Poet
I have come here to look for god
but make no claim of finding-
the quest, a journey
of righteous and humble men
strangers to their bodies
cartographers to the contour of women-flesh,
a border between nature and its lover,
man.

I am a woman
who walks by the motherhouse
of the sisters of the precious blood
sleeping beneath the snow
and can easily see myself there
my body sleeping beneath the silent
smell of fresh pressed linen,
the protection of closed doors
Against the cold
Against the foul breath ‘n’ beer
talk of Alaskan pipeliners passing through
Against the vibrant death this land is seeing…

Who do they pray for? Do they pray for this land?

The sister ventures out into the cold of noon
to play the campanas. They sound of time,
a flat resonance as I pass
no even twelve strikes but a sporadic three strikes here
another two-rest-again three
and I imagine she calls me as I always feared
to join her in her single bed
of aching abstinence.

I am the nun
as I am the Giusewa woman
across the road
who 300 years ago
with mud and straw and hands
as delicate as her descendant’s
now scribbling on dead leaves,
walled up the Spanish religion
built templos to enclose his god
while the outer cañón
enveloped and pitied them all.