Judith Ortiz Cofer > Quotes

“ I have always known
that you will visit my grave.
I see myself as a small brown bird,
perhaps a sparrow, watching you
from a low branch as you pray
in front of my name.
I will hear you
sound out my epitaph: Aqui descansa
una mujer que quiso volar.
You will recall telling me
that you once dreamed in Spanish,
and felt the words
lift you into flight.
The sound of wings
will startle you when you say "volar,"
and you will understand.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women

“The oldest woman in the village, Paciencia,
predicts the weather from the flight of birds:
Today it will rain toads, she says,
squinting her face into a mystery of wrinkles
as she reads the sky - tomorrow,
it will be snakes.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women

“Mourning suits us Spanish women.
Tragedy turns us into Antigone - maybe
we are bred for the part.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women

“You are transformed
into one of the gypsy ancestors
we have never discussed.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women

“Without you,
I am an empty place
where spiders crawl and nothing takes root.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women

“Living with her taught me this:
That silence is a thick and dark curtain,
the kind that pulls down over a shop window;
that love is the repercussion of a stone
bouncing off that same window - and that pain
is something you can embrace, like a rag doll
nobody will ask you to share.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women

“I was chaos on the first day,
waiting for the Word.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women

“In the wind that may travel
as far as you have gone, I send this message: Out here,
in a place you will not forget, a simple man
has been moved to curse the rising sun and to question
God's unfinished work.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women

“The decade is over, time to begin forgiving
old sins. Thirteen years since your death
on a Florida interstate - and again
a dream of an old wrong.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women

“She was mourning all her life - not for her husband, who had released her with his death, but for her own dead heart.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Line of the Sun

“Quincenañera

My dolls have been put away like dead
children in a chest I will carry
with me when I marry.
I reach under my skirt to feel
a satin slip bought for this day. It is soft
as the inside of my thighs. My hair
has been nailed back with my mother's
black hairpins to my skull. Her hands
stretched my eyes open as she twisted
braids into a tight circle at the nape
of my neck. I am to wash my own clothes
and sheets from this day on, as if
the fluids of my body were poison, as if
the little trickle of blood I believe
travels from my heart to the world were
shameful. Is not the blood of saints and
men in battle beautiful? Do Christ's hands
not bleed into your eyes from His cross?
At night I hear myself growing and wake
to find my hands drifting of their own will
to soothe skin stretched tight
over my bones.
I am wound like the guts of a clock,
waiting for each hour to release me.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer

“The sun and the endless hours of swinging a machete in the fields had taken him from child to old man with no stage in between.”
― Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Line of the Sun