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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

For lack of a better title- "What I did in Spring Break"


This Spring Break I decided to stay home and just chill. Of course the latter is difficult to come by when my three children and husband planned to do the same thing. Between the kid’s tennis and ballet classes, picnicking at Hide Away Lakes, a trip to the zoo, and watering my plants, I did talk to some neat people during the week. Among them Tumblewords’ founder Donna Snyder, poet Demetria Martinez, and my good friend and fellow writer Juana Quiroz who I admire tremendously for having finished her first novel. I also (and finally) visited The El Paso Museum of Art and was rapt with the Chicano Collection exhibition. If you haven’t seen it yet, I urge to visit, take a pen and pad, sit down, and let the downpour of color and vision stir your creativity into words. On my way out, I picked up Cheech Marin’s book Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge. Cheech Marin? Isn’t he like the funny guy? Yeap, and he isn’t so funny in this collection of plates and commentaries. It occurred to me that Cheech is not the heartbeat Cheech of my youth anymore. No, wait a minute I got the wrong person, but he has certainly transformed himself into a sort of art connoisseur; perhaps he always was but I just came into this awareness, and two: there is still much more to be done and be contributed to the Chicano arts community.

The combination of art and Cheech rendered this sonnet from my file. I wrote it last month in poetry class.

Soneto

My Shakespearean detonator, my tan
Hamlet, as prim as abuela’s townie bun
You talk I’m not your type- too Chicana
I’d never figure out Cole Porter’s pun
Not his tune, what with lineage like mine
Aunts too steep on pulque, boots, and what-not
Loudly whistling to Chente’s at the clothesline
Is Freya, and stiletto noses your jackpot?

Ah Chuy! in your linen I am your flor
Garnisht with heavenly guifts of high degree*
And cold and too far away is Stockholm
Ye saw that which no eyes can see

Forget Idunn, lay in my violets!
In my sheets and Mayan coverlets!




* From Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion

1 comment:

raw poetry by donna snyder said...

Pretty sonnet, and thanks for the good words!