Poetry / Blas Falconer
:: Gold ::
We came looking for it. A little farther. A little longer. One brick, then another. A house. A chapel. We will live here. We will pray here. And if some finds its way into our pockets, who will blame us? The small stone biting your hip all day. Tracing the impression with your finger at night. Mosquitos rising up in a cloud. A streak of blood smeared across your hand. The fevers. The heavy sleep. The raids. The fires. Everyone looking. Everyone looking away. Which way? Dear God, which way now? Find me, it says, sinking deeper into the ground. I am not here, it says, waiting for you.
:: The Belltower ::
After Campanario, Jose Melendez Contreras, 1960 It is alarm—this panic of sparrows loosed from the belltower, the night air come to life. They cannot settle, not while you’re here. The bell like a stone, the dome a heart, the birds ringing over the rooftops, someone somewhere, waiting for you.
:: Ars Poetica: A Cento ::
Over there, says the wind a sail ready to depart with my little joy four centuries of dawn casting themselves into the landscape my plainest song Let it be a duel of music in the air to open my arms to nothing rolling in a blue without ships, without port something like a world paused in its history In each dawn we will dissolve together and collapse in echoes across the earth and all the stars will come down singing There is so much sea swimming in my stars Only leave me as I am, ringing
—for Julia de Burgos
From the writer
:: Account ::
For a few years now, I’ve been writing explicitly about Puerto Rico, considering not just my experiences there or family legend, but its history, art, and language. One poem examines the collapse of Arecibo’s observatory, once the largest single-aperture telescope in the world. One studies the abandoned settlement of Caparra. The three poems featured here come from that project. “Gold,” a persona poem, is written in the voice of those who’d first come, who’d do anything, for the wealth that they imagined waiting for them. “The Belltower” was inspired by a painting, Jose Melendez Contreras’ Campanario (1960). The Cubism-influenced image renders a flock of birds in flight, alarmed perhaps by the sound of bells marking the hour. “Ars Poetica” is a found poem inspired by the work of the great Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, who my grandmother recited and lauded throughout my youth. Years later, I long for this place that loomed so large in my childhood, that shaped so many of the people dearest to me. Sitting down to write is a way of returning to the island—the countryside, the town square, the sea—and the people I once knew there.
Blas Falconer is the author of four poetry collections, including Rara Avis (Four Way Books, 2024). He is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. Falconer teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University and is the editor-in-chief at Poetry International Online.