"Living Witness" A Poem by Nati Román

Do read this powerful, very moving poem by a young San Antonio poet named Nati Román.  She delivered it last Friday at the conclusion of the Reverberations of Memory, Violence, And History: A Conference for the Centennial of the 1919 Canales Investigation of the brutal, lynchings of Mexicans by the Texas Rangers in the early 1900s at the Bob Bullock Museum in Austin, Texas.  

Some of the descendants of the victims attended the conference on Thursday.  Although I was unable to attend, I heard that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. (You can read more about the J.T. Canales investigation here.)

The whole conference will be made available to the public by the Texas A & M Center of Digital Humanities Research. Kudos to Professor John M. Gonzalez, Director of the University of Texas at Austin Center for Mexican American Studies and Texas A & M History Associate Professor Sonia Hernandez for putting on such an excellent conference. 

Nati is very modest.  We’re all letting her know that she’s got real talent with her soulful, poetic verse and historical imagination.  Keep writing poetry, Nati!

-Angela Valenzuela

#TexasHistory #Canales1919

Living Witness

          by

Nati Román

Because you were a strong little semilla

Full of life

You burst forth from the soil that nourished you,

Lifted your eyes to the sky

And let your billowing branches stretch across

The rippling silk pasture as if reaching

For the ends of the earth.

Because the Earth loved you and

The sky fed you,

Your roots burrowed deep

And your glistening leaves fluttered

Like a million tiny wings

Quien era el primero?

Who was the first to look upon your

Handsome, grooved face your

Thick, jutting limbs

And see their potential

To kill?

Those men, pale as stone

Insatiably hungry for land

Who draw lines in the dirt

Lines in the water.

They fitted you with cords and rope

That squeezed your arms like a tourniquet

Burned your bark and

Scraped it clean

That tugged like a caught bird and then

Was still.

The men of stone circled on their horses

Shouted and blasted their pistols into the air

And even

Laughed.

And as the men kept coming

And your arms kept burning you

Wept

For the men whose contorted clay faces

Lay etched in your mind.

Men the colors of clay and leaves

Men who laughed and fought

Kissed and spit

Men that twirled their señoras when

They danced

That slurped their caldo

And bounced their children on their knee

Men that worked long days

Men that worked for months men

Always willing to work

Men whose eyes burned like fire

Before the grip of the tree

Turned them to glass.

You heard the women cry out for them

In the distance

The women who suffered

So many women that suffered

Who put the pieces of their lives back together like patchwork

Who grew skin as thick as yours.

Do you feel the spirit brush

Your canopy as it ascends

Into the atmosphere?

Does it linger in your tangled branches?

Is it crystal cold with fear

Or warm like a flash of sun between

The shifting clouds

The birds no longer nested

In your tresses

You prayed for these souls to shake free

From your grasp

With the next heavy rain

Prayed the rain would cleanse you

Of the putrid stench of

death

When your leaves like memories shriveled and dried

You cast them into the night like

Cenizas in the wind

Then the winds changed

Tales of Cortina pierced the fog of fear like the arrows of our ancestors

Stories of resistance sprouted amongst the weeds

Women and men stood up and said:

“No nos vamos!”

And here you stand and

Here I stand

161 years later

Once a gateway to death

Now a portal to the past

I trace my finger along your deep ridged grooves

Like a needle along a tired record and

Hear the echoes of tragedy reverberate

Through time

Like a corrido with whose melody we cleanse

Our wounds.

I have traveled back in time to see you

To make sense of the stories

Told by our abuelas and our mothers

And discover

You have been waiting for me

You wait for all of us

Are you surprised by how quickly we have forgotten?

But here we are now

Face to face

And you still weeping year after year for

The souls that turned to butterflies beneath your shade

And you wait for us to remember

relearn

Rediscover

Reclaim our rightful place in

history