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Image: St. Paul, Minnesota: RNC 2008 (detail) © Joaquín Ramón Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera was recently named the Poet Laureate of California; he wrote this poem for LARB in remembrance of 1992. The artist and photographer Joaquín Ramón Herrera is his son.
Perched on Nothingness
Broken sidewalk — bleach ragged
The tree to the right homeless
Man under the bush
There is a tower wood the hawk
Perched on nothingness
Fields overturned gauged reddish
The face
Of Rodney King his hand scarred
His gaze dubious television
My son J. lost too where is he
Decades now the flames
The question of race
Too many faces too many killings
Color dissipates only race remains
race beyond race — race
LARB Contributor
Born in Fowler, California — learned corridos and rhymes from his mother, Lucha, on the farm working roads and small towns. His father, Felipe, played harmonica telling tales of work in early 1900’s Wyoming. He graduated from UCLA, Stanford and the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. His awards include the Guggenheim Poetry Fellowship, the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, LA Times Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award and recently, the International Latino Book Award. He is Emeritus Professor from Fresno State’s Chicano and Latin American Studies program and UC-Riverside’s Department of Creative Writing. In the last decade he has served as a Chancellor of the Board of the Academy of American Poets, California’s Poet Laureate, and the Poet Laureate of the United States. Recent book is Every Day We Get More Illegal.
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Where I Used to Walk
A poem by Juan Felipe Herrera in memorium for the officers killed in Baton Rouge