Ronald J. Pelias - One Poem

Bien

One hundred fifteen years
I carried my name,
Santiago Lazaro Perez,
gave it to a good wife
who now sits near
our dear Lady of Guadalupe
and to nine children, all
but two who I had to bury.
No está bien.

Now, I worked my patch
of banana, citrus, and mango,
worked everyday of my life.
So bent
I could hardly pick.
Had to use my cane to reach
what I could not.
And each day I’d lug
with each full crate
the pain of an old body.
No está bien.

So, I took the ladder
I climbed so many times
to the orange grove,
set it against the nearest tree,
went up, tied a rope,
and pushed the ladder away.
My weight on my neck
pulled me straight again.
I swung, proud.
Está bien.



Ronald J. Pelias’s poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Small Pond, Midwest Poetry Review, Margie, and Whetstone. His most recent books, Leaning: A Poetics of Personal Relations (Left Coast Press) and Performance: An Alphabet of Performative Writing (Left Coast Press), call upon the poetic as a research strategy.