Did I redeem myself, Mami? Papi?
Was I the native child you dreamed up
as you lay in the foreign bed you’d made
your first and failed exile in New York?
Did I excuse your later desertion,
leaving your friends behind to die? Did I
help to reframe that choice as sacrifice:
you gave your girls the lives they would have missed
growing up in a double tyranny
of patriarchy and dictatorship?
Did I redeem myself, my sisters, for those nights
I kept you up with Chaucer lullabies?
My love poems at your weddings? My calls
at midnight with a broken heart? And you,
dear lovers whom I mistook for husbands,
do you forgive me for forsaking you?
I heard—or thought I heard—a stronger call.
This love did prove the truest, after all.
And friends, can this be tender for your care?
Have I kept some of my promises here?
But harder still, my two Americas.
Quisqueya, did I pay my debt to you,
drained by dictatorship and poverty
of so much talent? Did I get their ear,
telling your stories in the sultan’s court
until they wept our tears? And you, Oh Beautiful,
whose tongue wooed me to service, have I proved
my passion would persist beyond my youth?
Finally, my readers what will you decide
when all that’s left of me will be these lines?