I've been accused in the past of--
well, I don't know, but--
of being political.
So I might as well get into that.
OK, here's one.
This one's called "Tomás Lucero," a letter.
Querido Tomás Lucero, "I wept when the police escorted you
on the train.
For years, when the train darkly whipped
across the llano at midnight shuttering my cot,
trembling ground was your voice still mourning your brother
killed in your yard by the police.
I wept when your small son was engulfed in a blast of steam.
As the Santa Fe train chugged off,
he stood there choking, breast heaving with tears,
a dark, small shadow in ghostly smoke.
But you have given me hope, Tomás.
I knew you were not a strong man.
When you knelt clutching your bloody brother
in your front yard across from my house,
I saw how you wept, begging the blood back,
the bullet holes healed, the terrible nightmare erased.
The dark, cloudy features of your face were an omen.
You looked up at the policeman, took your brother's gun,
and shot him.
Because of that one tragic moment,
you had to become who you were not.
Sniff air like a hunted coyote, try
to charm the moon to be your friend.
Because now hunted, you held alien weight
of your brother's gun in your hand instead
of your son's little body.
Now hunted, Earth became your bed, arroyos your paths,
instead of your wife's arms.
Now hunted, you rest on canyon rockrim that overlooks Tajíque.
You must have wept for a return--
just to sit on your porch, watch your children
playing in the yard as you scold your oldest son for trampling
chili plants in the garden.
We sent you food, and every day, I
have walked to your house to see how your family is doing.
When the police came to ask of you,
we shook our heads with silence and asked them, please leave.
And when you were finally caught,
I looked into your son's face again,
watching you embark the train for prison.
I saw the most beautiful, inexpressible love
and adoration burst and effuse over his sorrowful face.
And then months after, a mysterious nobility
filled his eyes.
Two dark wounds bleeding your image on everything
they looked on.
Tomás, never have I seen anything as beautiful, Tomás,
as your son who was becoming a man."
[APPLAUSE]