Thanksgiving Day 2017

Autumn Thanks

We are gathered here today

to observe, not so much the end of the Fast

which continues to this day relentless,

the way ancient glaciers dragged

boulders across centuries.

The rumbling mass of injustice

fueled by greed that you sought to starve César,

still careens under western and eastern skies alike

extracting widows, homeless, mourners, sufferers

in the lamentable social strife

in which we find ourselves. 

Light wanes turning leaves fire and gold

revealing over horizon’s lip

the margins of our days.

Time it is to give thanks

for grandpa and grandma

sitting in the old living room sofa holding hands

waiting for their slice of apple pie

and for the cousins playing

their annual football game

in the park across the street.

We gather to acknowledge

our mothers’ lost hours,

lost on growing the alabaster

bones on which we stand.

We give thanks for ancestors

who came before us and lost,

for courageous walkouts

and for those who subsist

on malnourished minimum wage checks

for they will one day be relics

of our grinding, slow march

toward justice. 

If we in our days, put a fraction

of what bird puts into her song

we may yet reap a future

when injustice and war are the moraine

of our present, bitter, epoch.

We are gathered here today.

                                             Claudia Castro Luna

Notes: 

César Chavez – “We are gathered here today to observe, not so much the end of the Fast” from On Ending Fast – 1968

From participant’s notes Cascade Women’s Program - “grandpa and grandma”

Abraham Lincoln – “commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged” from Proclamation of Thanksgiving  

Giving Thanks

On the eve of this day -with all its historical implications and complications - I find myself in a space marked by overflowing gratitude. So much has happened for me this year from the good to very good from great to impossibly fantastic. Is that me to whom these things have happened?

Among the highlights: publishing a new book of poems, a mini book tour in Europe for an Anthology of Salvadoran writers, the successful culmination of my tenure as Seattle's Civic Poet with my Poetic Grid, a segment on the PBS Newshour, the publication of two stories in two separate and highly valued anthologies, and the appointment as WA State next Poet Laureate!!

I am thankful for all of it. For every recognition and for every opportunity to engage with folks, learning from them, sharing together the thing I love and for years was afraid to admit: writing and  poetry. Above all I am thankful for the health of family and friends and for my own health.

But most of all I am thankful for the gift of living; I am grateful for the chance to live. I was mulling these thoughts on my walk today when a gust of wind shook hundreds of golden leaves from a Japanese maple tree directly in front of me. I ran toward the spiralling leaves, to be part of their movement, to maybe catch one, the way kids  try to snap snowflakes on her tongues. I managed to loose every leaf I tried to grab, but turned behind me following the trajectory of a tiny one to the ground where it became mine. Behind me, above me, over me arched a rainbow. I would have never known it had I not ran to embrace life.

Claudia Castro Luna Named 2018-2020 Washington State Poet Laureate

Claudia Castro Luna Named 2018-2020 Washington State Poet Laureate: The Salvadoran-born, former Seattle Civic Poet is the first person of color to assume the role. She'll succeed Tod Marshall, whose term ends January 31.

Dia de los Muertos = Dia de los Vivos

The dead descended from their heaven, crawled up from mother earth, swooshed down in the arms of sister wind to greet us, the living, on a cold November night in the heart of Beacon Hill in a place called El Centro de la Raza,  otherwise known as the Center of our Beloved Community. They came to visit, not in the heart of night, wrapped in shadows, purveying with fear their ghostly shapes, but in plain daylight, under bright incandescent and fluorescent lights, among throngs of people who on this day had come to El Centro to honor and remember them.

The dead pranced and danced in the throbbing bodies of the Aztec dance troop which, under unrelenting, if misty, freezing rain, performed for the the hundreds of us gathered for the evening.The Aztec dancers spun resilience, defiance, conviction and love until the incense, the calling of the drum, the rhythmic stomping of their feet, our gathered breath, became a river flowing to the ones that went before and flowing out to meet those who are yet to come.

Mesmerized on the sidelines, whirled into a vortex as if I myself were dancing, and inspired by the dancers' dazzling aliveness, their raw beauty, I began to laugh, an open bellied, full hearted laughter. There is no wall, no matter how well engineered, that can stop the flow of people responding to the call of life.

The dead danced for us through the bodies of the living - the steps, rhythms, movements passed down from one person to the next for hundreds and hundreds of years, through the glory of an empire, through the ruin of conquest, through the meanness of political expedience.

Spirit moves through brick, rock, steel. Power is transient. And inside sturdy bodies full of conviction the dead came to tell us they are here: in us.