By Martín Espada

Oh  your hair! How I long to stroke your hair with the tip of my wing
like the giant in that book about mice and men, so I escape your attic,
a mouse with wings, soaring above the mousetraps smeared with
peanut butter in your kitchen. You shriek at me and hand the giant
standing next to you a bat, not a bat like me, but a bat for hitting
baseballs, now a bat to hit bats, so I sail high and away, four times
around the room, a fastball slipping from the hand of the sweaty pitcher
who puts the tying run on first in the ninth inning. You toss the giant
a bucket to catch me, and suddenly I am incarcerated up against
the wall, so I beat my wings inside the bucket the way a drummer
improvises a solo, a song for you that silences the chatter in the nightclub.
The bucket dumps me into the night air, a bat with vertigo, and I flap
away upside down, searching the darkness for the light glimmering
from your hair, like the waterfall in that cave where all good bats go to die.

Poet Bio

The author of more than a dozen collections of poems, Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents. Before joining the faculty at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he worked as a tenant lawyer for immigrants. Many of Espada’s poems arise from man’s inhumanity to man: racism against minorities of all kinds, civil liberties violations, and political persecution. One of poetry’s qualities, he has said, is to humanize. In the aftermath of 9/11, he noted, “Poetry gives a human face to a time like this. Poetry gives eyes and a mouth and a voice to a time like this. Poetry records a time like this for future generations who want to know about a time like this in terms of the five senses, and in terms of the soul.” See More By This Poet

More By This Poet