Poetry Sunday: Every Day We Get More Illegal

It was announced by the Library of Congress last week that we are going to have a new national poet laureate. Juan Felipe Herrera, the son of migrant farmworkers whose writing combines experimentalism with reflections on Mexican-American identity and who just completed a stint as California's state poet laureate, will succeed Charles Wright in the national post.

It is a very timely appointment in that immigration is a much debated issue in the country at the moment. The problems of immigrants are central to much of Mr. Herrera's poetry. Here is an example of that poetry.

Every Day We Get More Illegal

by Juan Felipe Herrera

Yet the peach tree 
still rises
& falls with fruit & without
birds eat it the sparrows fight
our desert       
            burns with trash & drug
it also breathes & sprouts
vines & maguey
laws pass laws with scientific walls
detention cells   husband
                           with the son
                        the wife &
the daughter who
married a citizen   
they stay behind broken slashed
un-powdered in the apartment to
deal out the day
             & the puzzles
another law then   another
Mexican
          Indian
                      spirit exile
migration                     sky
the grass is mowed then blown
by a machine  sidewalks are empty
clean & the Red Shouldered Hawk
peers
down  — from
an abandoned wooden dome
                       an empty field
it is all in-between the light
every day this     changes a little
yesterday homeless &
w/o papers                  Alberto
left for Denver a Greyhound bus he said
where they don’t check you
walking working
under the silver darkness
            walking   working
with our mind
our life

     *~*~*~*

I like the rhythm and cadence of this poem. My only criticism of it and of other poems of his that I have read is the lack of punctuation. Why? I just don't get it, just as I could never understand e.e. cummings' prejudice against capital letters. Both seem peculiar and unnecessary affectations.

Sigh. I guess I just don't have the soul or sensibilities of a poet.

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