I rehearsed a speech in a language
that was assigned at birth,
hesitating to pronounce the happy
words of a dynasty that conceived itself
as human civilization.
They taught me water
I say swamp
because the moss and its oaks
have turned into
my biome, a floating home
between two seas and suns.
Between turtle bubbles
and gator shadows
I navigated canals
of corrections,
tongue-twisters,
and untranslatable idioms
that formed a barrier
wider than the rings of Saturn,
more impassable than the grammar
rules lacking
their cultural nest.
They called me foreigner in a thousand worlds,
they told me that I didn’t contribute to the autochthonous
tradition of New English letters
that would always be for those who knew
the rays of one sun and the smell of crystalline
water of a world covered in mountains.
When I returned again and again
to the ship where I lived,
I dreamed in sonnets and corridos
of all that Abya Yala gives us,
of prairies and cordilleras where condors
fly and storms thunder.
I sometimes imagine a cosmic caesura
…. Someone who can understand my words
of our heritage.
Since I always fight against
a culture in a museum
in a computer
that collects my words
of thanks, of sadness
without responding.
In remote areas
where all that remain are metal buildings
and the hum of excavators
that turn rock into illuminated tunnels,
I sing for my poet siblings
from the ship that travels
from the Earth and its worms
to the heart of a galaxy that also cries in Quechua,
argues in Portuguese and laughs in Chilean.
Wherever you are, I will teach you how to name
the birds, the satellites, and the stories
of our past and future,
all that is needed is to keep looking.