on bread and bendiciones

on bread and bendiciones

bendito sean tus manos,

says the woman to me.

blessed be your hands,
we stand still in a hallway in Miami

with a pale shade of midmorning

streaming in from the windows to my left,

her right,

the light now hugs the woman's cheek

and her hands in mine are like rainforests, long fingers like

palmas llaneras with their thin trunks

outstretched over a lazy river,

a hazy thing drifting by to the cry of the guacamaya,

but her palms can only be described as the color green

or the word lush

color and word first made known to me

by that most sacred motherland of Venezuela,

now reduced to a mere daydream shared by myself, the woman,

and her tropical fingers

fingers which make me yearn to curl my whole body into her hands and rest there,

to breathe in the wet Venezuelan air once more,

but, alas, I cannot, for we stand still in a hallway in Miami,

and the woman has misspoken in saying

bendito sean tus manos,

blessing my hands for giving our motherland bread.

bread, a tasteless offering,

the most humble of gifts for a land of riches hidden beneath rich soil,

deserving of only the finest things,

not bread.

but, the woman dares bless me for bread,

and I wish to scream or yank a fistful of that bendicion

from my own hands and shove it back into hers,

do not bless me, dear woman,

do not bless the sinner

who lounged in this ivory tower somewhere north of the Caribbean

for years and did not even spare a glance,

let alone bread,

for our shared mother Venezuela down below,

forsaking her who is my very life-blood.

woman, el padre nuestro himself knit me into our mother's womb

and she held me

nursed me with the fruit of the guanabana, that holy white flesh,

provided for me arepas and 

hallacas and

coconuts sold through cracked car windows

and the bluest ocean, that which even poetry cannot describe

please, do not bless me,

for have you heard, dear woman, what they say about bread now in Venezuela?

the surgeon in Caracas said,

"the death of a baby is our daily bread"

let me repeat it

he said the death of a baby is our daily bread

woman, that is reason to hold someone in your tropical hands and bless them

and cry with them and

let them curl up into your palms

and breathe the wet Venezuelan air of the past

and, even for just a moment in a hallway in Miami,

let them dream of a motherland that is still the color green and the word lush

and not the sickly yellow of the present,

the shade of sallow cheeks and concave bellies and weeds on unmarked graves.

that is a good reason to hold someone like you hold me now,

but do not hold me like this, dear woman, just to bless me

for feeding the mother bread.

for it is the only thing I know how to give from north of the Caribbean,

sending it to my beloved Venezuela

and her many hands and eyes and mouths,

bleeding and crying because

they are still so hungry.