The icy tentacles of winter are loosening their frigid grasp, no match for the gentle bursting buds and the swells of green popping out all over.
Rebirth and renewal, life goes on
and so do we here at Bluebell!
Today I bring you a ground breaker.
He is the first immigrant, the first Latino, the first openly gay person and the youngest person to be the U.S. inaugural poet.
Richard Blanco
I could have written about his
inaugural poem but that is readily
available if you want to look at it
Instead I chose a less famous poem
that I found absolutely spell binding.
His words create the picture and you feel as if you are right there touching the fruit and looking at the scene through his eyes. His writing style is profound and yet very conversational.
here, see what you think:
MOTHER PICKING PRODUCE
She scratches the oranges then smells the peel,
presses an avocado just enough to judge its ripeness,
polishes the Macintoshes searching for bruises.
She selects with hands that have thickened, fingers
that have swollen with history around the white gold
of a wedding ring she now wears as a widow.
Unlike the archived photos of young, slender digits
captive around black and white orange blossoms,
her spotted hands now reaching into the colors.
I see all the folklore of her childhood, the fields,
the fruit she once picked from the very tree,
the wiry roots she pulled out of the very ground.
And now, among the collapsed boxes of yuca,
through crumbling pyramids of golden mangoes,
she moves with the same instinct and skill.
This is how she survives death and her son,
on these humble duties that will never change,
on those habits of living which keep a life a life.
She holds up red grapes to ask me what I think,
and what I think is this, a new poem about her--
the grapes look like dusty rubies in her hands,
what I say is this: they look sweet, very sweet.
Richard Blanco is the author of a book of poems, City of a Hundred Fires
Till next time lovely readers,
Indie
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