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| Hawk carved from ironwood Photo by the author |
Ironwood
By Lisha Adela García
The Zapotec Tule tree of Oaxaca,
is the 4,000 year-old guardian
that forever breathes
resistance to conquest and decimation.
One twig of its canopy becomes an ambassador
to the Seri Shaman who plants its remembrance
in the sand of the Sonoran Desert shore.
Its majesty beseeches the ghosts
of ironwood tree for forgiveness.
Tourists, craving new oxygen
away from square boxwood hedges
hunger for carvings and fetishes
made from holy limbs shaped into quail,
hawks and sea turtles.
Totems shaped by idle Seri hands
who can no longer fish for food
among the tankers and debris
sold the immortalized spirit helpers
until world demand ate all the trees.
In a piece not fit for market,
a splintered ironwood branch lies in an arroyo
that leaks its flash floods to the mother sea.
The running rainwater smashes its grey
fibers against rocks to mingle
with mica sand and whispers—
laments only the Seri can hear.
The Tule twig moistens in the mist-wind,
softens with the fog and summons
ironwood with sacred incantations.
Will the Shaman’s entreaty
entice the wind,
persuade hidden ironwood seeds
to return and uncurl forgiveness
for the last of the Seri,
who rode with Turtle
in the beginning breath
and walked naked as pristine
coral reefs hummed along the coast?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Hasta Siempre
for Carlos Mariano García
Twenty years walking
on parent glass
to learn the ocean cannot
be nailed to the shore.
Lakes are ideal in their enclosure.
Children cannot be contained by goodness
or right intention. Their eyes
see through a blinding fog
to a road where I cannot name the trees.
I let go of my son the way an ocean
gives up a whole sand dollar to the beach,
and then retreats to noise and froth
against the rocks. He is now on his own
tarmac of grief and joy, each decision
framed by the doors I placed around his body
when he could not walk alone.
The mother conch is empty,
sand fills the center-pink vulva.
When he returns, I want him
to find home again in the grey
of my hair and the lines of my face.
Hasta Siempre means Until Forever
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Artists for Dinner
Like love,
artists rise from ditches
convinced they are the razor
that tempts the wrist.
The tiny mirrors that exist
beneath their flesh
encompass unique luminosities;
distinct wicks of unshackled color
that play with light,
air, sound or canvas.
Their words are ochre antlers that butt
heads on Texas Oaks,
preen what others take by force,
or take for granted.
They dance to the arc of a Bonsai tree,
stare all day at birds on a fence
to capture the vacancy
in a human eye.
At dinner, artists are conversation
gypsies wrapped in warm
loaves of bread.
They are cattails in potato soup
who laugh and write opera
from the stones
they carry on their backs
bathed in vinegar and brine.
Lisha Adela García is a bilingual, bicultural poet who has México, the United States and that land in-between in her work. She has an MFA from Vermont College and a Masters from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Lisha is a small business advisor at Texas State University and also a simultaneous interpreter and literary translator who is influenced by the American Southwest and border culture. She resides in San Antonio, Texas, with her beloved four legged children.
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