Working in the Dark

From Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio by Jimmy Santiago Baca:

I inherited this darkness. I am familiar with the ax and hoe, the obdurate silence of dirt that blisters my working hands. Each wound in me is a niche where icon saints champion pain, offering no way out but dreams of heaven. I caress the shovel handle as if it were a child's head whose hair I lightly tousle.

And this dark destiny formed my character. I am the man who didn't want to come home because domestic life was bad, the bill collectors waiting, the future bleak; and I drank to get the devil out of me. And when I spoke, my words left a dark mist on the air.

But darkness is that part of me from which I channel truth into my words, words like a virgin's first blood that stains the white sheets in lovemaking. It demands that I drink from life's bitterness, choking on the nauseous flavor. I hear the ancient resonance of Aztec drums in the stone-floor square, a language of the dead that cracks tombstones and flowers up out of the dirt, and I am consumed in fiery song. Words taken from the darkness are like birth-pain utterances. The sun wants a sacrifice and darkness wields a knife at my heart.

The language of barrio life is made of elemental images. Two birds clash in midair; a man snaps his fingers to a song of love won and lost; the earth trembles, souls change in the daylight dark. This is the poetry I mine, of my people and my place.

My words like spirit-sticks tap out songs, calling upon the darkness to evoke the spirits of our Chicano ancestors---Mayan, Olmec, Aztec, Mexican---and to make of their musics one Chicano song. Their breath, blowing through the hollow flute-shoots of my bones, gives me the song of the blue corn and Rio Grande water and pinto beans and green chile...and carnalismo.

My disinherited people have mated spiritually with horse and mountain, earth and llano winds. They mated with the great mothering darkness from which all life comes, flowing back into it, returning to the beginning to find the light that can reveal what their new beginning will be. We have not lost our darkness, as many cultures have. It is in that place we name ourselves Chicanos. And every bird, every rock, every glistening raindrop of our land call our name back to us.

Darkness anchors its hook in my blood. The great anchor drags my life this way and that. I am gaffed by the flower, raked across the plains, turned over with last year's field stubble; and I arise in my song as new grass in spring.

[AMG: This book is a shooting star shining in the night.....very bright and strong. Check it out!]