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My Name is Espada
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- Espada: the word for sword in Spain
- wrought by fire and the hammer's chime,
- name for the warrior reeling helmut-hooded
- through the pandemonium of horses in mud,
- or the face dreaming on a sarcophagus,
- hands folded across the hilt of stone.
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- Espada: sword in el Caribe,
- rapier tested sharp across the bellies of indios, steel
tongue
- lapping blood like a mastiff gorged on a runaway slave,
- god gleaming brighter than the god nailed to the cross,
- forged at the anvil with chains by the millions
- tangled and red as the entrails of demons.
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- Espada: baptizing Taíno or Congolese,
- name they stuttered in the barking language
- of priests and overseers, slave's finger pressed to the
blade
- with the pulsing revelation that a Spaniard's throat
- could seep blood like a fingertip, sabers for the
uprising
- smuggled in the hay, slave of the upraised saber
- beheaded even as the servants and fieldhands
- murmured he is not dead, he rides a white horse at
night,
- his sword is a torch, the master cannot sleep,
- there is a dagger under the pillow.
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- Espada: cousin to the machete, peasant cutlass
- splitting the cane like a peasant's backbone,
- cousin to the kitchen knife skinning a plátano.
- Swords at rest, the machetero or cook
- studied their blisters as if planets
- to glimpse the hands of their father the horseman,
- map the hands of their mother the serf.
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- Espada: sword in Puerto Rico, family name of bricklayers
- who swore their trowels fell as leaves from iron trees;
- teachers who wrote poems in galloping calligraphy;
- saintcarvers who whittled a slave's gaze and a
conqueror's beard;
- shoemaker spitting tuberculosis, madwoman
- dangling a lantern to listen for the cough;
- gambler in a straw hat inhabited by mathematical angels;
- preacher who first heard the savior's voice
- bleeding through the plaster of the jailhouse;
- dreadlocked sculptor stunned by visions of birds,
- sprouting wings from his forehead, earthen wings in the
fire.
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- So the face dreaming on a sarcophagus,
- the slave of the saber riding a white horse by night
- breathe my name, tell me to taste my name: Espada.
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from
A Mayan
Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen
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