Juan Felipe Herrara
Herrara’s work is profound and powerful. He captures the dialectic of dissonance:
“burns with trash & drug”
and beauty:
“it also breathes & sprouts vines & maguey”
It takes me to the desert. I am looking at the “scientific walls” and I see our broken system. Immigrants called thieves instead of humans with stories, purpose, and strength that should be validated for making it to the border, from a dignified welcome to a safe home to confidently build life in…not to just “walk and work with their mind and their life”. Herrara captures this in a way that does not sensationalize, it humbles, so we can’t sensationalize it. I’ve done so, I have turned a harsh reality of the world into an extreme story I have to look away from, and I lose the patience to sit in the discomfort and act on my care. I mistake the brief look as action. I feel an ache when I read this and an ask from the words to remember the name Alberto, the detention cells, the maguey, the peach tree, the spirit exiled. The only illegality is the system that needs to burn so the desert can be cleaned of its trash & drug. It makes me want to come back to the desert.
Yet the peach tree
still rises
& falls with fruit & without
birds eat it the sparrows fight
our desert
burns with trash & drug
it also breathes & sprouts
vines & maguey
laws pass laws with scientific walls
detention cells husband
with the son
the wife &
the daughter who
married a citizen
they stay behind broken slashed
un-powdered in the apartment to
deal out the day
& the puzzles
another law then another
Mexican
Indian
spirit exile
migration sky
the grass is mowed then blown
by a machine sidewalks are empty
clean & the Red Shouldered Hawk
peers
down — from
an abandoned wooden dome
an empty field
it is all in-between the light
every day this changes a little
yesterday homeless &
w/o papers Alberto
left for Denver a Greyhound bus he said
where they don’t check you
walking working
under the silver darkness
walking working
with our mind
our life
Everyday We Get More Illegal by Juan Felipe Herrera - Poems | poets.org
[Book of Delights pg. 53 | No.15 House Party]