Poetry looked for me in the barrio, on the subway, city parks, streets, stoops, corners, churches, and overlooked public spaces. I have always thought of this craft as graffiti on public culture, lines about the mixed feelings of learned truth that originate from the permanent Spanglish knot in my throat. The blank page received me without question, always open to barrio reveries and ready to heal wounds inflicted by those who cannot speak the mother tongue of marginal Latinx human beings. I write to find the right words that will help me understand the urban spaces of the inner city that gave me life. With poetry, I aim to say something about the exclusion that is familiar to people who have their backs pressed against the wall by cultures of cruelty and divisive politics. 

Poetry has been with me longer than I can remember, and it has been a companion to address with imaginative language the pulse of everyday life in disregarded places. The creative imagination patterned by a theological identity allows me to write about the experience of marginality, a divided society, the silence of God, the status-shackled church, the practices of hate, and those unheard. Poetry is that thing that grabs life by the arm and argues with God.  Poetry for me seeks to understand the world “more full of weeping than you can understand,” as Yeats observed—a world in which I find myself weeping more these days.  When I sit down to write, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of wanting to lift the veil on cultures of cruelty, especially in defense of the places I have come to suspect even God sometimes forgets.  

For me, the world is a walk around streets described in poetry as an imperfect Eden that invites us as I wrote to: "Come sit with me on the building steps/and whisper your sweetest dreams/so I can take them with me into other places/ to push away complaints."   Society needs its poets to show with words the facts of everyday life may be invested with a meaning that is capable of inspiring people to bend social reality in the direction of the justice needed to repair the common good.  Poetry is one of the oldest cultural forms of humankind, which is expressed in a great deal of religious writing.  In the 16th century, reformer Martin Luther believed in the importance of poetry for Christian theology: “I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure… I desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily.”  I think poetry is a kind of linguistic painting, scribbles on public culture, lyricism leaving one with images, activated thoughts, and a mix of feelings.  It helps us understand the world around us, it tells the truth slanted (Emily Dickson) and opens up the hopes, struggles, and vulnerabilities of the human condition.