Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I think we have a lot to learn from studies on empathy, and how people can foster empathy by reading and even writing poetry. I think about how important it is to use writing to heal, but I think it’s as important to use reading to understand different elements of the human condition.

We often talk about this with food or travel, how exposure to someone else’s life or experience helps us to broaden not only our minds but our hearts. I travel to South America each summer, and every time I learn so much about the different histories and culture of each area. Whether I’m visiting Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, or Buenos Aires, I’m reminded that each human experience is unique and nothing can be summed up. Even by saying South America or Latin America, I’m not doing justice to the singular cultural practices of each place.

In the United States, there’s a lot of discussion as to whether we should use the word Latinx. Some insist that we should say exactly where we are from: Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala, Columbia, El Salvador, and so forth. Some push against one term that dares to contain us all. Others insist that in order to have some semblance of power and agency in a country as large as the United States, it behooves our community to advocate for one another, as a larger entity, as a Latinx community. Regardless of your feelings about the names we use to define ourselves and our community’s identity, the one thing we can always be clear about is that everyone has their own stories about the border. It might be their grandfather’s story, or their mother’s, or their own, but the border looms large in our collective histories. Whether it’s crossing a river, or crossing a desert, or flying into JFK, or even the changing border being the thing to cross them, the border stories are as unique as the people telling them.

Today’s poem is a harrowing border story by Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora. I love how this poem turns the border landscape into a country all its own.

Saguaros
by Javier Zamora

It was dusk for kilometers and bats in the lavender sky,
                   like spiders when a fly is caught, began to appear.

And there, not the promised land, but barbwire and barbwire
                   with nothing growing under it. I tried to fly that dusk

after a bat said la sangre del saguaro nos seduce. Sometimes 
                   I wake and my throat is dry, so I drive to the botanical gardens

to search for red fruit clutched to saguaros, the ones at dusk
                   I threw rocks at for the sake of slashing hunger.

But I never find them here. These bats say speak English only.
                   Sometimes in my car, that viscous red syrup

clings to my throat, and it’s a tender seed toward my survival:
                   I also scraped needles first, then carved those tall torsos

for water, then spotlights drove me and thirty others dashing
                   into palos verdes, green-striped trucks surrounded us,

our empty bottles rattled and our breath spoke with rust.
                   When the trucks left, a cold cell swallowed us.

"Saguaros" by Javier Zamora, from UNACCOMPANIED, copyright © 2017 Javier Zamora. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.