A Spanish Galleon Contemplates the Future

video of Rhina P. Espaillat's featured poetry, A Spanish Galleon Contemplates the Future

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Rhina P. Espaillat

A Spanish Galleon Contemplates the Future

 

      Above me, sky; and down below, the stream.
      Loud on the wind that fills my swelling sails,
      A swarm of raucous seabirds dive and scream,
      circling the rigging and the churning wake,
      where they hunt their food and ride the gales.
      Do they speak, in the exultant noise they make,
      for the future, unknown and not yet real,
      but working to become?

                                                          Under me,
      the current drags its weight against my keel,
      like chains pulling me home to Spain again.
      Wind and water keep me bound in two
      directions: toward treasures of the sea,
      and the familiar soil that bred these men,
      my rough, ambitious, restless, ruthless crew!

      They also hunt—money, adventure, land—
      and carry with them everything they’ve known:
      that heavy burden, poverty; the cross;
      the force of power in another’s hand;
      reckless energy; the need to act alone;
      a taste for profit from another’s loss.

      How will they see the stranger—a new race—
      another’s food and customs, gods and speech,
      weapons and rituals, color, odor, face?
      How will that other see them? As if each
      were his own man, or as a faceless horde
      to be received with loathing and reviled?
      How will the future judge and then record
      Spain’s juncture with the undiscovered wild?

      España: the word ripples with pride
      in its long history of art, design,
      books in which the words are jewels arrayed
      as in a royal crown, or as each line
      of my body—calligraphy in oak—
      flows like a living being on the tide.

      Blessed by the Virgin’s eyes, my gallery
      wears railings whose medallioned squares evoke
      balconies, and the gallant artistry
      with which the lines of Spanish verse are made.

      Maybe these sailors, as live transplants do,
      will take root where they anchor, and at last
      earn what they seek to conquer: not through war,
      but through labor, the dream of something new,
      generous, risky, never seen before,
      more just and free than the retreating past.