Jack Agüeros
Puerto Rican poet, activist, and translator Jack Agüeros was born in 1934 in New York City. He served as director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem for nearly a decade, advocating the inclusion of Puerto Rican artists into the American art world of the 1970s. Agüeros was the author of three books of poems: Lord, Is This a Psalm? (2002), Sonnets from the Puerto Rican (1996), and Correspondence Between the Stone Haulers (1991), all published by Hanging Loose Press. He also published a collection of Julia de Burgos translations, titled Songs of the Simple Truth (1997). In 2012, Agüeros received the Asan World Prize for Poetry. Source
Sonnet: The History of Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico was created when the pumpkin on top of
The turtle burst and its teeming waters poured out
With all mankind and beastkind riding on the waves
Until the water drained leaving a tropical paradise.
Puerto Rico was stumbled on by lost vampires bearing
Crucifix in one hand, arquebus in the other, sucking
The veins of land and men, tossing the pulp into the
Compost heap which they used as the foundation for
Their fortifications and other vainglorious temples.
Puerto Rico was arrested just as it broke out of the
Spanish jail and, renamed a trusty, it was put in an
American cell. When the prisoner hollered, "Yankee, Go
Home," Puerto Rico was referred to the United Nations.
Puerto Rico, to get to paradise now, you have to ride blood.
Published:
1996
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Nuyorican Movement
Anthology Years:
2023
Themes:
Intersectionality & Culture
Memory & The Past
Poems of Place
Poetic Form
Literary Devices:
Imagery
visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work
Personification
the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing
Sonnet
A poem with fourteen lines that traditionally uses a fixed rhyme scheme and meter.