Let Us Celebrate Anew a Happy 4th of July: Edifice of Gold / Edificio en Oro

These poems I have published in several places now, but I would like to share them with you here to show you all that though our freedoms are presently threatened in this "land of the free & the brave," people -- asylum seekers from across the world -- still seek this land, even with all its threats to our liberties.

We need to fight for them, for our future, as we remember the words,

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

Elegy to a Refugee Girl/Oda a una niña refugiada

It's been too long since I've written. My life has taken on too many changes, too many problems have come my way, and the little time I have left outside of work I use to help the asyum seekers I have grown to love passionately, and who are under attack, so fiercely, so wrongly.

What have we become as a nation?

Christ Bleeds in the USA Too 
El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico
© Ana M. Fores Tamayo

My poems "Elegy to a Refugee Girl / Oda a una niña refugiada" will be published in a book entitled Detained Voices / Voces detenidas, edited by M. Montserrat Feu Lopez & Amanda Venta, from Sam Houston State University. 

For Father's Day, for World Refugee Day, which this year falls on Wednesday, June 20th, all fathers should be with their children; all children should enjoy, with their families, the freedoms afforded to those of us in the free world.

Our wings are stronger than their hate...

Lots of schools, universities, and communities are fighting for DACA students -- and alongside them too -- but these endeavors do not take away DREAMers' hurt, their fear, their mistrust in a system that supposedly was going to protect them.

What happens to all the information the government now has of DREAMers? 

Will it use it to not only come after them, but also their families? And who will help their families now? After all, a huge part of DACA, for these students and dreamers, was being able to help in the day-to-day struggles their families go through, as they try to adjust to immigrant lives no one wants to acknowledge.

Photograph © Alberto Gutierrez. Courtesy of the author. 

Refugiado / Refugee

Two years ago on World Refugee Day, I published a very personal essay about my status as a refugee child, back then, yet what it is like now for refugees and asylum seekers. Today, I publish my own poem -- in its original Spanish followed by my English interpretation (because translation is never poetry!) -- about the plight of the asylum seeker, so that we know. 

The border fence, with menacing clouds hanging © Ana M. Fores Tamayo

So that we can be witness to our own ungodliness. 

The English version was published in Bad Hombres and Nasty Women, from Raving Book Press: if you would like to buy it, go to this link. There are many other great works in this little treasure! But I wanted to print the Spanish original too, so I am publishing both versions here now, the English below the Spanish. 

Refugiado

Mi alma en pedazos,
Veo el alambre de púa
rasguñando metal contra piel.
Llorando lágrimas de sangre,
Escucho disparos al vacío del silencio
de la Salva Maratrucha.
Lo empujo bajo la cerca
pero llora mi hijo,
aunque no importa;
lo hago porque
lo quiero.

Sombras brillantes en un mundo de obscuridad / Brilliant Shadows In A World Of Darkness

In today's world of American politics, what are we doing to our future? Are we stomping on the many varied voices of tomorrow, on future Masters students, PhDs, scientists, lawyers, doctors, educators? Are conservative politicians afraid of losing their majority? In Texas, at least, this Latino majority is an impending reality, as it already is in California. Thus politicians repress people and pass reactionary laws that only promote racial profiling. No matter what the trump administration says about security, we know they are afraid of losing their rule. 

They offer bleakness instead of light & unity...

La Madre Patria /Motherland
Courtesy © of En Pie de Lucha Performance

May Day: Helping with the Migration Crisis Across Borders

For May Day, I will take part in one of the many marches against what trump is doing to immigration (I don't capitalize trump's name because he is not worthy). You can too: look at marches going on in A Day Without Immigrants!  More so, however, I will add my two grains of sand by writing about what we can do proactively to help immigrants today. 

I was thinking that, since trump was elected, he at least had to have a majority. Though that was never the case and he won through electoral politics, his popularity has suffered even more so since his election. A case in point: I was food shopping in my very conservative neighboorhood supermarket (I know: what am I still doing here?), when I saw a little note left for me on my car bumper, in response to a sticker I have: "Immigrants & Refugees WELCOME." 

The note said, verbatim: 

"Thank you for your bumper sticker. Immigrants & refugees are our neighbors" 😉

From this, I gather there is hope for everyone here in the United States: we are still a welcoming nation! I think my advice on helping asylum seekers and refugees, then, will come in handy, for those of you who really want ideas on next steps... 

Daybreak in Alabama by Langston Hughes

On Martin Luther King's Day, I'd like to share this poem, which I have shared before but which I find so striking not only for its beauty but also for its essence of simplicity. 

If things could only be this way! 

Delta Mississippi © Ana M. Fores Tamayo

And yet, there is no reason why hope cannot let us see that daybreak in Alabama, know that the next few weeks and months can be of grandeur and not of dread, because we will all be working together as one...