Ladies Sing The Blues
There is no word for a
parent who loses a child,
Only a sound, a howling
after which nothing-same remains.
Sweet music of mothers
singing the baquiné on their knees
In front of mass graves
swells outside Tocumen Airport in the early 90s.
Recently discovered bodies
are the subjects of their songs
As many lost their children
during the US Invasion of Panamá. Their voices
Melt like a mercy war
casualties never receive
Into an almost harmony,
into an almost single sonic tone.
Underneath their apotropaic
canto
A priest gives last rites a
second time for the deceased
In a pentameter matching
the cadence of the women’s sung prayers.
This wake is a second
chance to wake old-world religion, this
Velorio is a second chance
for Old Testament grace. Ladies sing of blood
Earth scorched by bombs,
molten men in tenement courtyards, and blood on the leaves.
Ladies sing of blood in the
high-pitched wind whistling through mango trees, and of blood
Gathering at the root of
truth building Panamá’s pursuits of American Dreams
& America’s pursuits of
paradise. See the alligator from the everglades run through
the rainforest with a
silver bullet for an eye? See the djembe drum’s rubber-tire hide?
What is idyllic about a
home like mine where so many mothers are forced to
Grieve their young? What is
beautiful about the ghost of maternal love
Haunting the blues baquiné?
Perhaps such ghosts are proof that
Home is the rare place
where love once existed, and the
Sad music of loss is
evidence that those
Mourned once did something
right.
Hear what the good-dead
leave behind: sage-incensed incantation in the vibrating
Timbres of each voice on
high as smoke rises with planes taking flight.
The Art of Diplomacy
The diplomat kids at the
international school were all from
Somewhere else, and those
of us who weren’t, needed to be
So I pulled a Sean John
shirt over my head as if
The logo were an American
flag, although not the same one
President Bush saluted
since nobody at school supported
American wars or military
operations like the one that destroyed
El Chorrillo, the bombed
ghetto behind my house where
I could still hear ghosts
at night crying
Socorro! as if even in death they never escaped
The flames. At school I
wore a bandana like Tupac Shakur
And other rappers our
Panamanian raperos and reggaetoneros
Imitated in their music
videos about
Wanting to escape gun
violence in el ghetto
But being unable to leave
good hood pussy behind.
There was always something
more credible about
Our moreno stories when
they were
Told to the beat of an
African drum
Played with an American gun
As if doing so made us
black cowboys or
The next closest thing:
West Coast gangster rap gods
Who rich kids worldwide,
like the ones at my school,
Could pretend to be
whenever they wanted.
To be a diplomat like our
fathers is to serve
The public what they need
to eat
Like when Alessa speaks
with little sympathy to me about her
Moreno chauffer’s
drug-addicted and jailhouse past
And I serve her Tupac
lyrics: First ship 'em dope and let 'em deal the brothers.
Give 'em guns, step back,
and watch 'em kill each other.
To be a diplomat like our
mothers is to understand others whether or not
You’re understood. Not
black like you, Alessa, says,
Black as in poor. They fill
their lives with drugs because
They can’t afford much
else, she attempts sympathy
While speaking to a teenage
me rocking Timberland boots and
The most expensive urban
wear my parents’ money could buy
Wondering what Panamanian
void I was filling with these
American things. Perhaps
there was a star-shaped black hole
The size of the Panamá
Canal in the Tommy Hilfiger flag draped
Over my chest as if my
chest were a casket, as if the government could fold
My body and hand it with
condolences to my next of kin
As they failed to do for
the families of West Indian men
Killed in service of an
imported American dream
During the canal’s
construction.
Maybe in this black hole my
negrura is finally its own country
And I’m finally at home in
my own skin.