Puerto Rico is a beautiful island paradise that visitors often take for granted. It is located right on the ocean so that its shores are home to some of the most amazing beaches but that is only what people who don’t live there see. This collection is from the heart of a native. Someone who knows Puerto Rico very well and calls it home. A place where the skin of its native sons and daughters as been kissed by the sun and the view of life from their perspective is calm and enchanting. Always recognizing the importance of family, the balance of having everything you need and not realizing that you don’t have as much as others because it doesn’t matter and the most important part of home- Mama’s cooking. The poem For the Love of Puerto Rico shares with us everything there is to love about the island from the views to the food and the all-around feeling of home. From sun rise to sunset the life of turning in constant circles, what it means to live life there. Which is balanced with I Hate Maria, a poem that tells of the destruction that hurricane Maria left on the island at the point of impact and still many years after.
Reflections on Being Puerto Rican
Nothing better than waking up
Not just the act of
But where that awakening takes place
Location is everything
Location is what makes us who we are
Location is where we take our first steps
So first I woke up
Then I crawled to walk
To the window and through the
Crack of the tan curtain in my mama’s living room
Was the burst of the sun
Not just any sun but the sun over my
Home, my land, my island of Puerto Rico.
Curtains open to a land that cannot be
Truly described by words
Because the vision is so spiritual
Like heaven had been sprinkled down
On this land of beautiful tan people
Skin perfectly kissed by the caramel Gods
The mixture of creamy milk and tents of sunlight
You can only see it if you’ve seen it
I have it, all over my body and flowing through my blood
Puerto Rico.