Poem: For the City that Nearly Broke Me 17

Black Jesus Speaks to Typhoon

Wind, do you remember breathing

through me; I was your instrument.

Come, let us sing again, you and I,

as your children gather rain, drum

beat stomp feet clap hands and call.

Let the trees sway, whisper, drop

their fruit. And when the waters recede,

a banquet at your children’s feet.

–

This is a good time to bring up the fact that my review of Adrian Castro’s Cantos to Blood and Honey is included in the latest installment of Latino Poetry Review. I bring this up now because I am thinking of Castro’s poem in which an entire community jams together in the time of Hurakán. This is just wind, of course, as is the air which blows through the silver trumpet. I think of the percussion in this jam session, rain against windows, houses, the streets.

And with Victor Hernández Cruz’s “Problems With Hurricanes,” (read | hear) I think also of all of this flying fruit pulled off the trees by the wind. But rather than letting a mango fly at rapid speed at Black Jesus’s head, or the heads of any of Typhoon’s children, I want to think of the generous relationship between Typhoon and her children, contrary to how we think of the violence and destruction of  a storm such as Katrina and the loss it/she brings.

Remember in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, there were cultural minorities who noticed the receding waters, made an appropriate offering, and headed to higher ground. So this is part of Black Jesus’s indigenization, his familiar relationships with the elements or animist deities, and his pre-City memory/imagination.

Tags: Adrian Castro, Latino Poetry Review, Victor Hernández Cruz