Ciudad Trujillo, 1957
The samán tree grew on our property
near where we bordered an abandoned lot,
fenced off with barbed wire, a no-man’s-land
we children were forbidden to explore.
Especially after the squatters came,
poor campesinos with their eyesore shacks,
hidden by double hedgerows from our house.
But from the branches of that tall samán,
we could see their tin roofs, their cooking fires,
their naked kids, their clotheslines hung with rags.
Beyond them stretched the military strip
where El Jefe’s elite and airborne corps
practiced maneuvers, roaring toward the sky,
their steel sides glinting, wings flashing like knives,
as if to clear a pathway up to God
and bring back all those disappeared below.
Waving, we watched them as they plummeted,
tanks rushing toward them in reconnaissance,
gun blasts shaking the branches where we sat.
It was our perch into the heart of darkness.
One day, the last day of my childhood,
as we straddled a branch, my sister told
the bloody politics of the body:
how I would bleed, how babies came to be,
how I would labor in delivery.
Then she swore me to secrecy or else
something so horrible she couldn’t tell
would happen! “Or else what?” I begged to know.
But she climbed down and left me looking at
what had already happened to the world.