And there is a story, an epilogue,
because when I sent my mother Silent Dancing,
she said, you don't remember anything right, do you?
Because since my father died, she sanitized our history,
and she only remembers him as this beautiful man in uniform,
and she does not remember this happening the way
it did-- this, my falling into the fire.
She says that, actually, what I did
was that I took a very expensive dictionary that my father had
brought home and dragged it out to the fire and thrown it in,
and myself nearly with it to get back at him.
And that if I remember anything hot,
it was my behind from the spanking
I got for that what happened.
And so I put that at the end of Silent Dancing
as a sort of reconciliation.
I still think I'm right, and I told her
that she has to write her own book if she wants
to tell her side of the story.
Now, the next poem was the one that Alison put in the flyer,
and it's about Fidel Castro.
I wrote it recently because the man has not aged well.
He used to be a beautiful young man,
and when he first took over Cuba,
all the women in Puerto Rico thought
he was like a movie idol.
You know, he was underneath all that hairy face,
he was like Che.
Che was gorgeous.
And so this is a poem about what I remembered.
The people in Puerto Rico wanted Castro to take over Cuba
because they hated Batista.
Batista was a corrupt, nasty man--
so they thought.
And then it wasn't long after that all the new atrocities
started happening, and it became a sad thing.
But anyway, it's just a little poem,
but once again world conflict or war comes into my life,
and Cuba didn't stop coming into my life
because my father disappeared on a ship for six months
during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and so it has
played a big part in my life.
It's called "A Legion of Dark Angels."
They came down from the Sierra Maestra,
from its dizzying heights wearing
the green of the forest shouting prophecy.
Those dusty dominions.
Those archangels in full armor nearly floating
through the ecstatic crowd.
Their bearded leader sad and proud
as the rejected Messiah finally entering his Jerusalem.
Called in from play to witness Cuba's liberation
on our grainy TV screen, we heard
our father quote a poem in Spanish
he remembered from school.
A line about Puerto Rico and Cuba being "de la misma
ave, las dos alas."
Of the same bird, its two wings.
And because he had been to Havana
and had called it Batista's whore,
he said, God bless Fidel, instructing
us to look upon a hero's face.
And mother, crying softly for the sons and the brothers who
had not returned, kept saying, Amen, Amen.