Poem

Henry from the island of Jamaica Jamaican digging crews have to sleep eighty men to a room, in huge warehouses like the ones where big wooden crates of dynamite are stored. My hands feel like scorpion claws, clamped on to a hard hard shovel all day, then curled into fists at night. At dawn, the steaming labor trains deliver us by the thousands, down into that snake pit where we dig until my muscles feel as weak as water and my backbone is like shattered glass. But only half the day is over. At lunchtime, we see sunburned American engineers and foremen eating at tables, in shady tents with the flaps left open, so that we have to watch how they sit on nice chairs, looking restful. We also watch the medium-dark Spanish men, relaxing as they sit on their train tracks, grinning as if they know secrets. We have no place to sit. Not even a stool. So we stand, plates in hand, uncomfortable and und

On an island of music in a city of drumbeats the drum dream girl dreamed   of pounding tall conga drums tapping small  bongó  drums and boom boom booming with long, loud sticks on big, round, silvery moon-bright  timbales .   But everyone on the island of music in the city of drumbeats believed that only boys should play drums   so the drum dream girl had to keep dreaming quiet secret drumbeat dreams.   At outdoor cafés that looked like gardens she heard drums played by men but when she closed her eyes she could also hear her own imaginary music.   When she walked under wind-wavy palm trees in a flower-bright park she heard the whir of parrot wings the clack of woodpecker beaks the dancing tap of her own footsteps and the comforting pat of her own heartbeat.   At carnivals, she listened to the rattling beat of towering dancers on stilts   and the dragon clang of costumed drummers

The first story I ever write is a bright crayon picture of a dancing tree, the branches tossed by island wind. I draw myself standing beside the tree, with a colorful parrot soaring above me, and a magical turtle clasped in my hand, and two yellow wings fluttering on the proud shoulders of my ruffled Cuban rumba dancer's fancy dress. In my California kindergarten class, the teacher scolds me: REAL TREES DON'T LOOK LIKE THAT. It's the moment when I first begin to learn that teachers can be wrong. They have never seen the dancing plants of Cuba. Source:  Enchanted Air   More Dangerous Air: by MARGARITA ENGLE

Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teachers say it's the end of the world. At school, they instruct us to look up and watch the Cuban-cursed sky. Search for a streak of light. Listen for a piercing shriek, the whistle that will warn us as poisonous A-bombs zoom close. Hide under a desk. Pretend that furniture is enough to protect us against perilous flames. Radiation. Contamination. Toxic breath. Each air-raid drill is sheer terror, but some of the city kids giggle. They don't believe that death is real. They've never touched a bullet, or seen a vulture, or made music by shaking the jawbone of a mule. When I hide under my frail school desk, my heart grows as rough and brittle as the slab of wood that fails to protect me from reality's gloom. Source:  Enchanted Air   (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2015

Two sets of family stories, one long and detailed, about many centuries of island ancestors, all living on the same tropical farm... The other side of the family tells stories that are brief and vague, about violence in the Ukraine, which Dad's parents had to flee forever, leaving all their loved ones behind. They don't even know if anyone survived. When Mami tells her flowery tales of Cuba, she fills the twining words with relatives. But when I ask my Ukrainian-Jewish-American grandma about her childhood in a village near snowy Kiev, all she reveals is a single memory of ice-skating on a frozen pond. Apparently, the length of a grown-up's growing-up story is determined by the difference between immigration and escape. MARGARITA ENGLE'S POEM: Kinship Source:  Enchanted Air  (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2015)

Spades take up leaves No better than spoons, And bags full of leaves Are light as balloons.   I make a great noise Of rustling all day Like rabbit and deer Running away.   But the mountains I raise Elude my embrace, Flowing over my arms And into my face.   I may load and unload Again and again Till I fill the whole shed, And what have I then?   Next to nothing for weight, And since they grew duller From contact with earth, Next to nothing for color.   Next to nothing for use, But a crop is a crop, And who’s to say where The harvest shall stop? ROBERT FROST POEM: The CodeHeroics