Martin Espada: A poet for social justice and human rights

Martin Espada is a Latino poet, writer and critic and academic at the University of Massachusetts where he teaches poetry.

Martin Espada has published seventeen books as poet, translator and publisher and his poetry and writings display a deep commitment to issues of social justice, political activism and human rights. For many years Espada worked as a tenancy lawyer in a legal service in a neighbor legal services program. An interview with Martin Espada can be read here.

Martin Espada was born in Brooklyn. His poem the Sign in My Father's Hands was written about his father who was a leader in the Puerto Rican community and civil rights movement. The poem The Soldiers in the Garden is from his book The Republic of Poetry.

The Sign in My Father’s Hands
by Martín Espada

—for Frank Espada

The beer company

did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans,

so my father joined the picket line

at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion, New York World’s Fair,

amid the crowds glaring with canine hostility.

But the cops brandished nightsticks

and handcuffs to protect the beer,

and my father disappeared.

In 1964, I had never tasted beer,

and no one told me about the picket signs

torn in two by the cops of brewery.

I knew what dead was: dead was a cat

overrun with parasites and dumped

in the hallway incinerator.

I knew my father was dead.

I went mute and filmy-eyed, the slow boy

who did not hear the question in school.

I sat studying his framed photograph

like a mirror, my darker face.

Days later, he appeared in the doorway

grinning with his gilded tooth.

Not dead, though I would come to learn

that sometimes Puerto Ricans die

in jail, with bruises no one can explain

swelling their eyes shut.

I would learn too that “boycott”

is not a boy’s haircut,

that I could sketch a picket line

on the blank side of a leaflet.

That day my father returned

from the netherworld

easily as riding the elevator to apartment 14-F,

and the brewery cops could only watch

in drunken disappointment.

I searched my father’s hands

for a sign of the miracle.

Martin Espada,

“The Sign in My Father’s Hands” is from Imagine the Angels of Bread. Copyright © 1996 by Martin Espada.

The Soldiers in the Garden

by Martín Espada

Isla Negra, Chile, September 1973

After the coup,

the soldiers appeared

in Neruda’s garden one night,

raising lanterns to interrogate the trees,

cursing at the rocks that tripped them.

From the bedroom window

they could have been

the conquistadores of drowned galleons,

back from the sea to finish

plundering the coast.

The poet was dying;

cancer flashed through his body

and left him rolling in the bed to kill the flames.

Still, when the lieutenant stormed upstairs,

Neruda faced him and said:

There is only one danger for you here: poetry.

The lieutenant brought his helmet to his chest,

apologized to señor Neruda

and squeezed himself back down the stairs.

The lanterns dissolved one by one from the trees.

For thirty years

we have been searching

for another incantation

to make the soldiers

vanish from the garden.

“The Soldiers in the Garden” is from The Republic of Poetry (Norton), copyright 2006 by Martín Espada