Born
in New Mexico of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago
Baca was raised first by his grandmother and was later sent
to an orphanage. A runaway at age thirteen, it was after Baca
was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison at
the age of twenty-one that he began to turn his life around:
there he learned to read and write and found his passion for
poetry. He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American
Book Award, the National Poetry Award, the International Hispanic
Heritage Award, and, for his memoir A Place To Stand,
the prestigious International Award.
Baca
has two new books released March 2004: The Importance of
a Piece of Paper (Grove/Atlantic) and Winter Poems
Along the Rio Grande (New Directions).
His books also include:A Place to Stand, Healing Earthquakes,C-Train
& Thirteen Mexicans, Black Mesa Poems, Martin & Meditations
on the South Valley, and Immigrants in Our Own Land.
Movie scripts and productions include Bound by Honor (Blood
In, Blood Out), Hollywood Pictures/ Disney, and The
Lone Wolf—The Story of Pancho Gonzalez, HBO Productions.
"Ten"
is published here with permission from Jimmy Santiago Baca and
from Grove Press.
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from
Healing Earthquakes, Book V, "Rebirth"
If
it does not feed the fire
of your creativity, then leave it.
If people and things do not
inspire your heart to dream,
then leave them.
If you are not crazily in love
and making a stupid fool of yourself,
then step closer to the edge
of your heart and climb
where you've been forbidden to go.
Debts, accusations, assaults by enemies
mean nothing,
go where the fire feeds you.
Turn your attention to the magic of whores,
grief, addicts and drunks, until you stumble upon
that shining halo surrounding your heart
that will allow you to violate every fear happily,
be where you're not supposed to be,
the love of an angel who's caught your blood on fire
again, who's gulped all of you in one breath
to mix in her soul, to explode your brooding
and again, your words rush from the stones
like a river coursing down
from some motherly mountain source,
and if your life doesn't spill forth
unabashedly, recklessly, randomly
rushing in wonder at life,
then change, leave, quit, silence the idle chatter
and do away with useless acquaintances
who have forgotten how to dream,
bitch rudely in your dark mood at the mediocrity
of scholars who meddle in whimsy for academic trifles—
let you be their object of scorn,
let you be their object of mockery,
let you be their chilling symbol
of what they never had the courage to do, to complete, to follow,
let you be the flaming faith that makes them shield their eyes
as you burn from all sides,
taking a harmless topic and making of it a burning galaxy
or shooting stars in the dark of their souls,
illuminating your sadness, your aching joy for life,
your famished insistence for God and all that is creative
to attend you as a witness to your struggle,
let the useless banter and quick pleasures
belong to others, the merchants, computer analysts
and government workers;
you haven't been afraid
of rapture among
thieves,
bloody duels in
drunken brawls,
denying yourself
the essence of
your soul work
as poems rusted
while you scratched
at your heart
to see if it was a diamond
and not cheap
pane glass,
now, then, after returning from one more poet's journey
in the heart of the bear, the teeth of the wolf,
the legs of the wild horse,
sense what your experience tells you,
your ears ringing with deception and lies and foul tastes,
now that your memory is riddled with blank loss,
tyrants who wielded their boastful threats
to the sleeping dogs and old trees in the yards,
now that you've returned from men and women
who've abandoned their dreams and sit around
like corpses in the grave moldering with regret,
steady your heart now, my friend, with fortitude
long-lasting enduring hope, and hail the early dawn
like a ship off coast that's come for you,
spent and ragged and beggared,
if what you do and how you live does not feed the fire
in your heart and blossom into poems,
leave, quit, do not turn back,
move fast away from that which would mold your gift,
break it, disrespect it, kill it.
Guard it, nurture it, take your full-flung honorable
heart and plunge it into the fire
into the stars, into the trees, into the hearts of others
sorrow and love and restore the dream
by writing of its again-discovered wild beauty.
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