AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "ODE TO THE SOCCER BALL SAILING OVER A BARBED-WIRE FENCE" BY PUERTO RICAN AMERICAN POET MARTÍN ESPADA



MARTÍN ESPADA, poet, editor, essayist, and translator, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957 to a politically engaged Puerto Rican family. He studied history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned his Juris Doctor law degree at Northeastern University-Boston. For many years (1987-1993), Espada was a tenant lawyer and legal advocate for low-income, Spanish-speaking tenants in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a town across the Tobin Bridge from Boston.


Since the publication of his first book of poetry, The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero, in 1982, Espada has published more than twenty books. Among his notable poetry collections are Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hand (1990) which won the 1990 PEN/Revson Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996) won an American Book Award. Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002 (2003) won the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was named an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. The Republic of Poetry (2006) was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.


His most recent collection of poems, Floaters, in 2021, won the 2021 National Book Award.


Espada's many awards and fellowships include the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2018), the Shelley Memorial Award (2013), the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award (2008), the Robert Creeley Award (2004), an Academy of American Poets Fellowship (2018), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), and the PEN/Revson Fellowship in Poetry (1989).


Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.


Photo Credit: Official Website at www.martinespada.net



ODE TO THE SOCCER BALL SAILING OVER A BARBED-WIRE FENCE BY MARTÍN ESPADA



Tornillo...has become the symbol of what may be the largest U.S. mass detention of children not charged with crimes since the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans.

—ROBERT MOORE, TEXAS MONTHLY



Praise Tornillo: word for screw in Spanish, word for jailer in English,

word for three thousand adolescent migrants incarcerated in camp.


Praise the three thousand soccer balls gift-wrapped at Christmas,

as if raindrops in the desert inflated and bounced through the door.


Praise the soccer games rotating with a whistle every twenty minutes,

so three thousand adolescent migrants could take turns kicking a ball.


Praise the boys and girls who walked a thousand miles, blood caked

in their toes, yelling Spanish and a dozen Mayan tongues on the field.


Praise the first teenager, brain ablaze like chili pepper Christmas lights,

to kick a soccer ball high over the chain-link and barbed-wire fence.


Praise the first teenager to scrawl a name and number on the face

of the ball, then boot it all the way to the dirt road on the other side.



ODE TO THE SOCCER BALL SAILING OVER A BARBED-WIRE FENCE continued



Praise the smirk of teenagers at the jailers scooping up fugitive

soccer balls, jabbering about the ingratitude of teenagers at Christmas.


Praise the soccer ball sailing over the barbed-wire fence, white

and black like the moon, yellow like the sun, blue like the world.


Praise the soccer ball flying to the moon, flying to the sun, flying to other

worlds, flying to Antigua Guatemala, where Starbucks buys coffee beans.


Praise the soccer ball bounding off the lawn at the White House,

thudding off the president's head as he waves to absolutely no one.


Praise the piñata of the president's head, jellybeans pouring from his ears,

enough to feed three thousand adolescents incarcerated at Tornillo.


Praise Tornillo: word in Spanish for adolescent migrant internment camp,

abandoned by jailers in the desert, liberated by a blizzard of soccer balls.

SOURCE: Floaters: Poems, poetry collection by Martín Espada, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, USA, 2021.