Rings and Poetry and Latin America

I got my class ring today...it's all just seeming more and more real. I'm graduating from college. With a degree. To hang on my wall. In my...what? Office? Study? Home library? Right. Adulthood doesn't fit very well yet...it's sort of like new skin after a peeling sunburn. A little tight and not quite mine.

I watched Imagining Argentina last night. It's about the desaparecidos in the 70s and 80s. I picked up a copy of Gioconda Belli's From Eve's Rib today...a bilingual translation of her poetry. Latin America keeps coming up. Maybe that means something. Maybe. Leave me to my musings and I'll leave you with a poem. It's called "The Blood of Others." Belli amazes me.

I read the poems of the dead.
I survived.
I lived to laugh and cry
and I shouted Patria Libre o Morir
from the back of a truck
the day we reached Managua.

I read the poems of the dead,
watching the ants on the grass,
my bare feet,
your straight hair,
your back arched at the meeting.

I read the poems of the dead.
Does the blood in our bodies that lets us love each other
belong to us?