15 Oct: "The Body" by Jimmy Santigo Baca

For some back ground knowledge on the poet: Jimmy Santiago Baca, From Prison To Poetry.

The Body

Feeling the bars,
Running my fingers over them,
Smeared with blood, bugs,
And bits of dried food.
A forest of bars . . .
The flesh must toughen to the cold,
Must callous to the rock,
I must learn to heal my own wounds,
Clack the rocks of my heart together
To bring fire,
And bleed the poisons from my body
In the fields where I sweat,
Walking quiet not to disturb
The great apes and tigers,
Walking carefully around traps
With sharp little bamboo shanks,
Camouflaged in socks and cloth shirts
Of the hunters and the hunted.

2 comments:

  1. Strength from within, spirituality perspective...? I really loved the viewpoint...from within the bars...must be strong and self heal, make fire out of nothing, and head danger, back into the wild he remains...

    One of my all time favorite books is Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" on his time in Holocaust internment camp:

    "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

    In this poem, he is choosing to figure out what it takes to survive...and possibly thrive. All of the references seem positive and strong.

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  2. Positive mentality, but it sounds like prison to me. Apes, tigers, shanks, and hunters, oh my.

    I really like this poem too. It creates a perfect movie in my head. Why did he choose "forest" of bars instead of "jungle?" I would change those two words. On second thought, maybe not. Forrest are maybe more uniform in structure? Most importantly, I've never been in a prison before and Mr. Baca spent 5 years in one.

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