Cha Lectures 9 - Red Beard (Barba Roja)

Justin Pickering

A red beard on
a milky face from the land of the whipping wind
and the broken dark
where the ice on the ground
betrays the depths and warmth of our hearts.
Our tiny homes and tiny lives can seem so huge to other people, but we know
that they really aren´t
so large and out of control.
And my own tiny life...
Half English and half Italian and now half something else - a transformation.
Que no entiendo muy bien.
Powerful bats swing on Landsdowne St.
and there are thousands and thousands who will never understand
what the sound of that crack (el sonido... o som...)
as the tiny white sphere hurtles like suicide over a Green Monster.
My little red beard, all alone for now is sometimes
Written off - a tick mark on a scorecard amongst thousands of white faces
the same as the snow that covers the land for months and months
and never ceases.
The incessant mental traffic of one lone Bostonian
El incesante tráfico mental de un sólo Bostoniano...
in Texas, learning from Latin Americans... de mis hermanos...
One Unitedstatsian amongst a thousand brown faces
learning, playing, fighting, laughing, dancing, and misunderstanding
one another (sometimes)
in a lonely room where such comments
on discourse and the intelligibility of the word and poetic device and narrative technique should make sense
but don´t. No tienen sentido.
For every word you have in your head, I have 2 more... one from Spain and one from Brasil.
You say "fork", I can say "tenedor" and "faca"
and you laugh because it sounds like "fucker"
but it´s only because you haven´t learned yet
like my 16 year old brother Paul
who forces himself to learn the magical rites
of driving in Big Dig traffic.
Our world is a place where is the roads change every day:
Es sumamente cierto que las calles se mueven de forma, un torbellino hecho de concreto y conducido por fuerzas que no podemos ver.
And where once there was a clear path, there is now a wall.
We have to learn the language of the roads
that have been mapped in our minds,
the languages of our "others", our "brothers"
in space and in time,
separated by the sword and by la pistola
if we are to save ourselves
and not feel like hurt little children
running to the bathroom to get sick
and not knowing why.