Craig Santos Perez

cantfindit

Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan/Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, co-star of the poetry album Undercurrent (Hawai’i Dub Machine, 2011), and author of three collections of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008), from unincorporated territory [saina](Omnidawn, 2010), and from unincorporated territory [guma'] (Omnidawn, 2014). He has been a finalist for the LA Times 2010 Book Prize for Poetry and the winner of the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry. He is director of the Creative Writing program and an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, where he teaches Pacific literature and creative writing. Source

Love in a Time of Climate Change

recycling Pablo Neruda's "Sonnet XVII"

 

I don't love you as if you were rare earth metals,

conflict diamonds, or reserves of crude oil that cause

war. I love you as one loves the most vulnerable

species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

 

I love you as one loves the last seed saved

within a vault, gestating the heritage of our roots,

and thanks to your body, the taste that ripens

from its fruit still lives sweetly on my tongue.

 

I love you without knowing how or when this world

will end. I love you organically, without pesticides.

I love you like this because we'll only survive

 

in the nitrogen rich compost of our embrace,

so close that your emissions of carbon are mine,

so close that your sea rises with my heat.

 

Published:

2020

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2024

Themes:

Love & Relationships

Nature

Poetic Form

Science & Climate

Literary Devices:

After Poems

A poem where the form, theme, subject, style, or line(s) is inspired by the work another poet.

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Repetition

a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times

Sonnet

A poem with fourteen lines that traditionally uses a fixed rhyme scheme and meter.