by Caridad Moro-Gronlier
All in by Caridad Moro-Gronlier
In April 2024, Caridad Moro-Gronlier was appointed the second Poet Laureate in County history by Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. She is the author of Tortillera, the winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize published by Texas Review Press (2021), and Visionware (Finishing Line Press, 2009) as well as the editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing (Beacon Press, 2020). Her work has been featured in The Best American Poetry Blog, Verse Daily, NPR, The Hive, Split This Rock, Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, and others. She is the recipient of a Julia Peterkin Literary Award, an International Latino Book Award Honorable Mention, an Eric Hoffer Book Award Honorable Mention, First Horizon Award Finalist, three Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs Miami-Dade Individual Artists Grants, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry.
This poem first appeared in Pleiades: Literature in Context, Pleiades 441, Spring 2024.
by Caridad Moro-Gronlier
I have crossed a continent
to cast forty-nine names into the sea,
cuarenta y nueve nombres mangled
by anchors—Flores, Paniagua, Sanfeliz—
on a beach strewn with bones
of giants: Redwood, Sequoia, Sitka Spruce.
Behemoths that would not stay buried.
Before the ruined beauty of this necropolis,
saplings cleaved to elders, grew
stronger in each other’s arms
as they danced in darkened groves,
lit by the strobe of sunlight, dappled
limbs akimbo, unprepared for annihilation,
unprepared for the spilled sap, the glint
of the axe, the buzz saw, the prayers
planted at the root of their destruction.
I step over titans battered down
to driftwood, stripped of tannin and pulp,
bark bleached white as sheets and offer
forty-nine names to the sea,
cuarenta y nueve nombres.
Here I can believe the ocean
returns what she is given.
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