Published 13 Aug 2020
Poems for Contemplation: "Song"
Poet Brenda Cárdenas invites us into a remarkable experience in this offering from our Summer 2020 Poetry Series.
By Brenda CárdenasA blog post Women Scholars and Professionals
This summer The Well is featuring a series of poems by women. Ruth Goring invites you to approach them curiously and meditatively
Song
You shout my namefrom beyond my dreams,beyond the picture windowof this Rosarito beach house.Rushing from bed to shoreI glimpse their backs—volcanoes rising out of the sea.Your back, a blue-black silhouette,feet wet with the wash of morning waves.Fountains spring from mammal minds,my hands lifting a splash of sand.I'm on my knees,toes finding a cool prayerbeneath them, fingers pressingsea foam to my temples,while you open arms wide as a generation,raise them to a compass point,dive.If you could reach them,you would ride their finsunder the horizon,then surf the crash of wavesleft in their wake.And if I could graspmy own fear,I'd drown it,leave it breathless and blueas this ocean,as the brilliant backsof whalessurfacingfor air.
Photo by Macro Mama from StockSnap.
A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Brenda Cárdenas is the author of two poetry collections, From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (Momotombo Press, 2005) and Boomerang (Bilingual Review Press, 2009), as well as the coeditor of Between the Heart and the Land / Entre el corazon y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest. She writes in a blend of English and Spanish, which she has said reflects her interest in “the interconnectedness and juxtapositions of difference and similarity between seemingly disparate peoples, events, places, and experiences.” While Cárdenas often writes in free verse, she also experiments with a variety of forms, and, as Craig Santos Perez has noted, “This syncretic formal impulse reflects the polyphonic texture of Cárdenas’s language-scape.” Her poetry has appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (2007) and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007). She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and was Milwaukee’s poet laureate from 2010 to 2012.