Words Chosen for the Wall
Harold Recinos presents seven poems
Stellar Cave II, Julien Salaud, Installation made entirely of screws and thread inspired by prehistoric paintings in France's Lascaux Caves, Singapore Art Museum @ 8Q, Queen Street, 2013. Photo: Choo Yut Shing
POET’S NOTE
In the barrio, I learned poetry is a way to call out various and different kinds of oppressions and visions of life, to quote Eliot “at the still point of the turning world.” Words Chosen for the Wall is a collection written in the dark hours of marginality and it offers us a way of knowing, inviting us to imagine new possibilities of life together.
–h. j. Recinos
December 2024
SUPERIOR
you claim to be superior
in thought, goodness and
color of skin. how peculiar
it must be to live history
inside a supreme fallacy that
people like me who have stayed
whole no matter how often
you dangled us from trees or
sliced us to pieces find thousands
of ways to protest to rush the end
of empire’s atrocities.
Tyrants
a republic made by the blood
of the tired poor who suffer and
labor for years with broken backs
has no freedom to impart or light
to overwhelm the darkness in its
corridors of government. the tears
of those not considered will only
go on collecting in puddles as they
have ever since God in big steeple
churches decided not to say a word
to the wretched of the earth who
are not on speaking terms with are
ligion lacking love for the stomped,
cursed, tortured, and killed. a republic
that bends its knees to pray to a God
that claps for executioners, the Herodian
thugs nailing the poor to cheap wood
trees, and politicians who eat the hearts
of the crucified with applesauce knows
too little about life and far more about
the tyrants who keep their hands in the
public till.
Gaza
with terrifying violence, they
have taken the lives of the
ethically innocent in Gaza by
way of the criminal massacre
of human beings considered less
by their executioners. sadly, on
either side of the conflict God is
called a friend by killers and for
victims a partisan to revenge. now,
no one lifts hosannas to heaven and
dear Jewish friends who lost more
than a few they so deeply loved last
Autumn shake with a weeping not
comforted by prayer. why must the
earth be bloodied? how many times
must it be said that death cannot be
a way of life? when will we know
the hallelujah of life together in real
peace? today, the cries from the middle
east makes the planet tremble with the
news of thousands of Palestinian children,
mothers, elderly, and blameless left dead.
bloody Gaza begs us to know the land
belongs to those created by a God of life
who mourns with the living.
October
a mild October chill has
ripened with leaves changing
colors on still trees and crows
calling from branches. little
birds are gossiping beside old
nests, children imagine the
paths to take on Halloween and
every breath we take it seems
stirs the earth beneath us and
nothing bids us weep. we tell
ourselves to root for peace, to
listen to her tireless voice and
look for stretching light. then
again, the Autumn leaves rustling
in the gentle wind asks heaven
are you listening to the sound
of many tongues, the remarks
of different nations, the sorrow
in broken hearts and the pleas
to stop the dread of many who
are never named? tell us God
what is the value of life today
for a Jew, a Palestinian, and the
wretched on your earth?
Evening
walk with me on this warm
evening down the Avenue
lined with projects reaching
to the East River. kiss the
little kids playing on the
surface of the spiraling earth
with the sounds of laughter
and the precious Spanglish
they speak spilling into the
streets. let us walk until the
sunken heads of old women
who arrived years ago with
profound dreams are raised
and their old-world hearts
beat the cadences buried deep
in us. stroll these boulevards
with me not described in the
poetry books with faded ink
and yellowing pages and see
how love arises like a fresh
legacy from the troubled hearts
of men and women who long
ago wrote on the tenement walls
Oscar Romero Ora Pro Nobis!
Decolonial
I wonder how often God sees
us laughing about disobeying
the foolish thoughts of white
theologians that find nothing
more than faults with the faith
of invisible people in barrios
they never visit. I would like
to know whether Jesus took the
time to pray for the Boricua boy
shot in the back last week on the
corner, for Joey who ended his life
on a rooftop with a needle still in
his seventeen-year-old arm and all
the Brown skinned people who like
the so-called son of God cannot speak
a lick of English. help me to understand
the prayers of the women taking care
of other peoples’ children, the fatigued
men cutting grass and shaping gardens
with the weight of families across the
border explaining to them daily their
new way of life. the blood stains in the
barrio turned into words that question
the complicity of Christianity in assuring
the satisfaction of the greed that sailed
across the Ocean to carry out imperial
deeds—your God I must say does not know
everything!
The Country
we live in a country with
people more inclined to ban
books than read them, the Koran
gets burned, Jesus is a white man,
beautiful Black lives rarely see the
arc of history bend toward justice,
undocumented migrants get deported
by the left and right to paradises of
death, rich white men are unaccountable
to law, women of every color are subjected
to the will of pretentious men in power
and what gets coughed up by white supremacist
has apparent validity for God. we live in a country
in which churches pray and sing to sanctify
the evil deeds of wealth, the violence of the
Klan, the message of the Proud Boys, the
ditious dreams of Oath Keepers and the
practices of hate against victims in colors
not white, languages not english and religions
not Christian. we live in a country where the
sick, the wounded and the dead killed by the
gun are ignored by legislators kept by the NRA
so exhaustively tamed. we live in a country that
cannot imagine bread for the hungry and where
most white citizens are unable to confess the
lynched bodies placed in despicable graves.
“Words Chosen for the Wall is a conversation with country, oppressors, a silent God, love, and familia. Harold Recinos punches through the divide with the voice that stands with the wounded human. One moment you are walking along the river and the next on the edge of the earth at Machu Picchu, Recinos leaves no stone unturned in this collection…”
Edward Vidaurre,
Author of By Throat, by Miracle: New & Selected Poems
