Perched on Nothingness

By Juan Felipe HerreraApril 30, 2012

Perched on Nothingness

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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