This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox
Harmless Halloween ghosts and skeletons give way to early November’s celebrations and commemorations: Day of the Dead, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day. Today’s poem, “Bonebreakers” by M. Soledad Cabellero, moves from Ezekial’s Valley of Dry Bones to, as the poet explains, “the structural violence of immigration systems.”It, likewise, remembers the dead.
M. Soledad Caballero is a Macondo, CantoMundo, and StoryKnife fellow. Her debut collection, I Was a Bell, won the Benjamin Saltman poetry prize; Flight Plan, also with Red Hen Press, is due in 2025. She teaches at Allegheny College and splits her time between Meadville and Pittsburgh.
The author states, “When I was drafting this poem, children from the Americas were fleeing homelands, crossing deserts, rivers, oceans to escape….violence that is inherently integrated into structures that are imagined to be neutral but are ideological.”
Here’s “Bonebreakers” by M. Soledad Caballero:
Bonebreakers
The bones will rise, that is what Ezekiel says.
Gray and dusty, buried beneath the dirt, the sand,
the rocks and dry leaves. They have been there
for decades, have been like chalk, like old flour,
so thin, so empty of breath. These are the bones
to be lifted. They will have breath blown into them,
like a whirlwind of life. Skin will grow, thick muscle,
tendons, blood. Ezekiel says that all the parts will grow
like moss, like algae on the water. Spreading everywhere,
covering the skeletons of the dead with layers of
tissue and organs. In the story, this is the sign of God,
promises made in the book of time when there were
old men who waited for signs in the sky and in the trees.
God signs, even after so many years as dirt.
Families climb, crawl, drag bones that already
have breath. Hearts that already beat.
They have breath. They are not silent with death.
They wish for lands of light. Families reach the borders,
a prophecy of hope. Children come to this land
of stone and grit and blood holding their fathers’ hand,
holding onto their sisters’ hand, holding on, still
breathing, still alive in the midday sun.
We take them, make meat of the hearts,
the bones, the children. We mark them
with words of salt. We cage them in
frozen cement. We use bricks. We use fists.
We use teeth. We use bare hands.
We are harbingers of dust and wounds.
We break bones. We are bone breakers.
Originally published in: Queen Mob's Teahouse, an online lit mag that ran from 2014 to 2022, then collected and published in Queen Mob's Teahouse: Teh Book, edited Russell Benentts, 2019.
That was “Bonebreakers” by M. Soledad Caballero.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
