Culebra Island, Puerto Rico, 1989

All the windows are guileless and open to the sea,
_           _the murmur of Atlantic coral:
smash them,
_           _smash them with your song,
wild to the Western ear—
_           _And who are you,
with your stripping punches—
_           _you’re uprooting the palms,
you’re tearing the leaves—
_           _oh what you love is the skeletal—
and who am I,
_           _that you would take my verdant snake,
my blessed island,
_           _and dash it to pieces?

If this day, this aftermath,
_           _is a thorny school,
the sere light and the day,
_           _then what is the lesson in it?
That the gift is always imperilled?
_           _That the swart, surviving horses,
the veteran palms
_           _seem more alive now, more alive?—

In the iron, gargantuan hush:
_           _medicine and smithereens,
a fierce concentration
_           _on cherishing the living.
From spirit back to spirit again;
_           _dash it to pieces, Creator, Destroyer,
you pirate god, Huracán,
_           _with your ferocious gangplank,
your pitiless and raucous
_           _wind-that-will-ensure-grief—

And yet it dares to be born,
_           _mud-fresh, mud-fresh,
like a foal,
_           _amid the wreckage, the bankruptcy:
from spirit into flesh again:
_           _resilience.