Monday, May 4, 2009

10:45 am. Social Security Office, Berkeley, CA

It takes an hour and half, even with the help of a very friendly social worker, to fill out all the paperwork on my application for disability benefits and Medicare.  I turned fifty-five in February and the premiums on my already costly insurance shot up to $1200 a month.  Even with all my papers in order and clear evidence that I have not been able to work for three years, it will take another year before the government starts paying for a portion of my medical expenses, which overshadow every other item in my budget.  

(This poem was written in 2003 for the Middle East Children's Alliance. I reposted it in response to todays news from Gaza.) 

Memorial

The island of Mona is in the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.  It's a lima-bean shaped piece of coral seabed that got lifted 200 feet into the air, it has a plateau full of sinkholes and riddled with caves, covered with aromatic brush full of lizards, wild goats, birds and giant iguanas.  Sand has piled up over the millennia and made a slightly moister lowland of palms, shade trees and clouds of butterflies, where the single brackish spring rises. In the sparkling, incredibly clear waters below the cliffs, sharks cruise, dolphins leap and great sea turtles feed in the shallows.  

(Introducing the OtheRicans Anthology at the Puerto Rican Studies Association meetings in San Juan. PR, Oct 2, 2008)

1

for Kerry St. Pé

Polypodia, the many-footed fern
stands on the broad limbs of the live oaks
like armies, like breadlines
waiting for rain.
Bent, brown, dead-looking,
thirsty at the side of the road,
no-one looks at them.

Cuba y Puerto Rico son Cuba and Puerto Rico
de un pájaro las dos alas. are the two wings of one bird,
Reciben flores y balas receiving flowers and bullets
en el mismo corazon. into the same heart.

Lola Rodriguez de Tió

Two wings of one bird said the exiled poet
whose words burned too many holes of truth
through the colonial air of a different iron-toothed occupation.
Nothing divides the suffering of the conquered.
Two wings, she said, of a single bird, with one heart between them,
taking bullets and roses, soldiers and prison bars and poetry,
into one pulse of protest. One bird she insisted
as the ship pulled away from San Juan headed for Havana, 1879.

JUNE 30TH

My wheelchair is an exoskeleton protecting the soft body offatigue. I get out of bed, walking slowly on my curved foot and my overworked one; the foot that cramps and aches and curls inward onto its edge trying to figure out where it is, to reconnect, and the foot that does more than its share and gets tired, the heroic and sullen foot that steps in to carry the limp. My whole body aches and trembles with what people call fatigue as if it had anything to do with a long work week, a tiresome commute, the ordinary, “boy I’m bushed!” of ordinarily tired people. I carry the fatigue down the stairs to the shed, unlock the shed, unlock the padlocks, unplug the recharger cable, slide into the seat, and suddenly I am uplifted and embraced. Comfortable foam cushions me from below and behind, and I’m surrounded by the yellow ribs of this new body, rest on new leg bones. I relax into this enameled-steel-mid-wheeled statement to the world that I can’t walk another step. I no longer have to tell the people on the buses and trains to get up out of the specially marked blue symbol seats. My new outer shell says it for me. People step aside, apologize for being in my path, stand without being told, so I can be strapped into place for my bus ride. The chair speaks for me, a new and less exhausting form of speech. It’s the shiny carapace that lets the world know my species.