Not going to read very many poems today from this book.
"Counted lines of sorrow for a sonnet, rapidly-rhymed beats
of fury, my own verses soon flow, shrieking and groaning
from my smuggled pen.
I walk with empty hands, letting the rhythm of footsteps
turn into silence or birdsong.
I never know which to expect.
Time and distance vanish.
I feel lopsided, like a tree that reaches toward sunlight,
rising from a rooted forest of hurried, buried truce.
I feel the mysterious power of growth."
That's in Tula's voice, Avianela's voice,
but as I imagined from what she wrote
about her experience of trying different forms of poetry.
My most recent verse novel is Silver People,
and I'm going to start with introducing
this as the first one of my historical verse novels
for young people not set in Cuba.
It's set in Panama, and I'm going
to read just a couple of paragraphs
from the historical note at the end to introduce it.
"In the American-ruled Canal Zone,
laborers from all over the world were
subjected to a system that resembled South Africa's
apartheid.
Did you know that?
I'm shocked at how few Americans think about the Panama Canal
at all.
Dark-skinned Islanders and olive-skinned southern
Europeans were paid in silver.
Light-skinned Americans and northern Europeans
received gold.
Housing, meals, recreation, and hospitals
were also strictly segregated.
Of the estimated quarter million Caribbean Islanders
who worked in Panama between 1850 and 1914,
at least one-third never returned to their homelands,
but fanned out across Central America,
becoming an integral part of the region's
rich cultural heritage.