Martín Espada > Quotes

“Advice to Young Poets

Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head.”
― Martin Espada

“Even the most political poem is an act of faith.”
― Martin Espada

“In the republic of poetry,
the guard at the airport
will not allow you to leave the country
until you declaim a poem for her
and she says Ah! Beautiful.”
― Martin Espada, The Republic of Poetry

“In the republic of poetry, poets rent a helicopter to bombard the national palace with poems on bookmarks, and everyone in the courtyard rushes to grab a poem fluttering from the sky, blinded by weeping.”
― Martxedn Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems

“the doctor gestures at the X-ray where the lung crumples like a tossed poem.”
― Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems

“Did you know? When the bullet exploded the stars in the cosmos of your body, did you know that others would read manifestos by your light? Did you know, after the white ambulance left, before the coloured ambulance arrived, if you would live at all, that you would banish the apartheid of the ambulance with Mandela and a million demonstrators dancing at every funeral? Did you know, slamming the hammer into the rock’s stoic face, that a police state is nothing but a boulder waiting for the alchemy of dust? Did you know that, forty years later, college presidents and professors of English would raise their wine to your name and wonder what poetry they could write with a bullet in the back?”
― Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems

“I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn
will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder
how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves
still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke
every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore.”
― Martín Espada, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: Poems

“You said: There’s a lot of places out there, friend, so you would go, smuggling a suitcase of words across every border carved by the heel of mapmakers or conquerors, because you had an all-night conversation with the world, hearing the beat of unsung poems in every voice, visiting the haunted rooms in every face. Drive, you said, because poets must bring the news to the next town: You got a song, man, sing it. You got a bell, man, ring it.”
― Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems

“The poet’s house was a city of glass:”
― Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems

“One day, years later, the soldiers wheeled around to find themselves in a city of glass. Their rifles turned to carnival glass; bullets dissolved, glittering, in their hands. From the poet’s zoo they heard monkeys cry; from the poet’s observatory they heard poem after poem like a call to prayer.”
― Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems

“You sent your last letter months ago about the poems you could not write, no words to sing when the president swears that God breathes the psalms of armies in his ear, and flags twirl by the millions to fascinate us like dogs at the dinner table.”
― Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems

“Soon your ashes fly to the veterans’ cemetery at Arlington, where once a Confederate general would have counted you among his mules and pigs. This poet’s coat is your last poem. I want to write a poem like this coat, with buttons and pockets and green cloth, a poem useful as a coat to a coughing man.”
― Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems

“At the tomb, a woman silent all along steps from the circle and says: I want to sing. Neruda. Poem Twenty. Then she climbs atop the tomb and sings: Tonight I can write the saddest verses.”
― Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems

“you mailed your banned poems cloaked as letters to your sister-in-law because the silence of the world was a storm flooding your ears.”
― Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems

“Now you are dead, your heart throbbing too fast for the doctors at the veterans’ hospital to keep the beat, their pill bottles rattling, maracas in a mambo for the doomed.”
― Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems

“When the poet died, they brought his coffin to the city of glass. There was no door: the door was a thousand daggers, beyond the door an ancient world in ruins, glass now arrowheads, axes, pottery shards, dust. There were no windows: fingers of air reached for glass like a missing lover’s face.”
― Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry: Poems