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Chiapas

By Gary Soto b. 1952 Gary Soto

There is the one who turns

A spoon over like a letter,

Reading the teeth-marks

Older than his own;

The one who strikes a match,

Its light flowering

In his eyes,

The smoke in his throat;

The one who opens the mouth

Of a dog to listen

To the sea, white-tipped

And blind, feel its way to shore.

At night

They walk in the streets,

The dust skirting their legs

Raw with lice

And the wind funneled

Through a doorway

Where someone might pray

For a loaf of good luck.

Somewhere the old follow

Their canes down

A street where the front

Pages of a newspaper

Scuttle faceless

And the three-legged dog hops home.

A door is locked twice

And flies ladder a scale of fish.

Somewhere a window yellows

From a lantern. A child

With fever, swabbed in oils

And mint, his face

Spotted like an egg,

His cry no different

Than the cry

That shakes the trees lean.

A candle is lit for the dead

Two worlds ahead of us all.

Gary Soto, “Chiapas” from Where Sparrows Work Hard (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981). Copyright © 1981 by Gary Soto. Reprinted with the permission of the author, www.garysoto.com.

Source: Poetry (January 1979).

Biography

Gary Soto is known for a body of work that deals with the realities of growing up in Mexican-American communities; in poems, novels, short stories, plays and over a two dozen books for young people, Soto has recreated the world of the barrio, the urban, Spanish-speaking neighborhood where he was raised, bringing the sights, sounds and smells vividly to life within the pages of his books. Soto’s poetry and prose focus on everyday . . .

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