The Days You Bring
Rev. Dr. Harold J. Recinos presents excerpts from his newest collection of poetry
Sunrise over the Bronx, New York, 2011. Photo: Dwayne Bent
The Bronx-themed images in this feature are curated by Open Plaza (mouseover for photo credits and captions).
Excerpts from The Days You Bring (2022) by Harold J. Recinos are used by permission of Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers, https://wipfandstock.com/.
POET’S NOTE
Poetry came looking 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, poems saturated with the mixed feelings of learning truth that originates from the permanent Spanglish knot in my throat. The blank page received me without question, always open to barrio dreams and ready to heal the wounds inflicted by those who cannot speak the mother tongue of marginal human beings. I write to find the right words that will help me understand the barrio that gave me life.
–Rev. Dr. Harold J. Recinos
Friends
my friends enjoy windy nights
on city park benches nodding
to the faint sound of children
in their last half-hour of play.
they spend hours talking about
the girl without parents, brothers
lost in wars, mangoes that fell
at the oddest hours and dreams
touched only by God. my friends
laugh about plastic slip-covered
furniture, doors that open to dark
spaces, the beauty of dark-skinned
selves and the idea of a civilized
whiteness. my friends are sleeping
in the subways, the flop houses, the
park, the bus stations, the tenement
roofs and stairwells bemoaning the
fascist use of race, the contempt for
Spanish and the power of Providence
imagined by murder, rape and theft
of land. my friends drink on the stoop
saying life is not a long misery in
the dark, the different, the exile, the
hated, the angry and the non-English
speaking siblings of Christ.
South Bronx Timeline mural by Andrew Antonaccio and Fillio Galvez (2Alas) at 138th Street and Grand Concourse, Bronx, NY, 2015. Courtesy New York City Department of Transportation
Love
love in a time of illness
opens the gates, breaks
down the walls, sells all
hate, hushes crying and
brings dreams alive with
a simple kiss. in these times,
love enfolds us, has us cling
to each other on earth with
thirsty lips, stirs the finite
frame with heaven and feeds
the hidden sacred flame. love
in a time of illness is tender
with the faltering voice, warm
with the sorrowing heart and
always a kindle of hope. love
is an unpredictable emotion
rushing like a river to wash
us clean and cut canyons in
our fragile soul.
Nurse provides a Bronx resident with vaccination in support of state efforts to provide mass COVID-19 vaccinations administered by the New York State Department of Health at Yankee Stadium, Bronx, NY, 2021. Photo: Staff Sgt. Christopher S. Muncy, courtesy of New York National Guard
The Village
we live in a place
that knows nothing
about walls and doors
though the air becomes
heavier each day and
Jesus is met on empty
lots hiding in trash and
sleeping in cardboard
huts with poor Puerto
Ricans not accounted
for in the evening news
or white metaphysics.
we are the people you
tell jokes about in cocktail
parties, cross the street to
avoid in big cities, never
embraced in church and who
chew beneath the evening
light the same bread. we
are those who hang from a
thread unseen, earning petty
wages that decomposes all
hope and who marched with
Martin the day he gave the “I
Have a Dream” speech. we are
the people who still show up
on Sunday to listen with tired
faces, grieving hearts and
decaying faith to the same
old crumbling good news
that only offers fives loaves
of rotted bread and two dead
fish. we are the people of the
block wondering what will
become of us, our Spanglish
kids and Black and Brown
hands around here, carrying
la biblia.
“Opening Eyes on Opening Day,” Yankee Stadium, West Concourse, Bronx, NY, 2010. Photo: Still the Oldie
Bedtime Stories
I fetched a book at bedtime to read
to each of my children over the years
recalling, at the end of each
chapter, years spent in libraries to get
out of the cold when homeless. I read
C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia again
and again, showing my kids how stories like
this lead us to the places where enchanted
fruit hangs. the nightly ritual was the
most beautiful off-the-record prayer my
kids enjoyed with me and still I say with
trembling lips, give me more time. they
are grown now but know how to trust the
darkness when they lay their sleepy heads
for a rest that takes them into dreams of
timeless love. I often wonder why the years
ran so swiftly and then I whisper their names
in the odd hours of the morning when the stars
are steadily shining to cast spells in many
parts and to help the dark see.
Detail of lion door handle, Gould Memorial Library, Bronx Community College, City University of New York, Bronx, New York, 2015. Photo: Bestbudbrian
Resurrection
we sat on the stoop
watching a couple of
dogs rummage through
garbage wondering out
loud about the place the
resurrected line up, the
graffiti they must come
up with, whether it is a
space where sun shines,
the ocean is carried in the
wind, the Puerto Rican
girls fancy skipping rope
like on the block, widows
shed black dresses, inner
city soldiers see the return
of lost limbs, old men never
tire and tears are swept away never to be
dropped. Tito wondered
whether or not you would have
a better time in that place by
going around the block spray painting
passages of scripture
on the walls of banks, stores and the
tenements that did not rent
an apartment to his mother, Cuca. I
confessed not having an answer
for him, then shared when children run
games on the streets and the
storefront churches are bustling with the
noise of Spanish sung
hymns Eden abounds down here and the
path to the resurrection
line in heaven is clearer than the river that
watered the garden in Eden.
Mural on the side of the Good Counsel home, a shelter for pregnant women in crisis, in the South Bronx, NY, 2016. Photo: Paul Sableman
Living
or months these boys walked
in search of a destiny in a new
country. they have worn smiles
step after step, floated the river
on truck inner tubes, thought up
a personal trip vocabulary and in
unison sang of the world that just
pushed them into exile. there will
be no use looking for the names of
village streets in the city that awaits
them and it will take time to begin
to understand others who will give
orders in work places in a language
that might as well be wordless. who
knows like the immense beauty of
the moon for lovers and the sweetest
dreams ever imagined while lighting
a candle to la Virgen de Guadalupe
freedom will finally come for them
and they will soon stand on their own
two feet.
Dancing Pumpkin (2020) by Yayoi Kusama on display in the plaza in front of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Bronx Botanical Garden as part of the exhibit KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature, Bronx, NY, 2021. Photo: Wally Gobetz
Walking on Fifth
let’s follow the clouds down
Fifth Avenue, detour through
a few alleys and places we have
never seen. let’s walk imagining
home is near, hiding inside each
Spanish word, hearing them call
us from sidewalk trees and the noon
church bells tolling. when the wind
rises and blows North on Fifth, feel it
gently touch you without whispering
the name of this city, and let it say we
are not alien visitors here. take in the
smells, telling stories, have a good look
at the old arrivals who settled generations
ago and have forgotten not to speak in
English, and remember why you did not arrive on Ellis Island.
Tomorrow
I was walking down First Avenue
by myself, made the sign of the
cross when passing the big old
Catholic church, felt a strong cold
wind against my face and thought
we’ve been crossing the Jordan
almost every day on these streets
and not once found the promised
land or the dreams rolling around
in our heads. the old man I ran into
on Avenue B carrying a fish beneath
his arm whispered the same tired
words that miracles are on the other
side of the water that doesn’t flow
down here.
“Signs of the End,” Bronx, NY, 2016. Photo: Paul Sableman
The Light
morning is a time to see
with the sounds of birds
whistling in the wind, to
hear migrant footsteps that
approach from the South,
observe the elderly couples
in old gym clothes walking
the sidewalks and children
come out to play. in the Perez
grocery store, old women are
already buying spices for an
evening meal, the disabled
vets set up their domino table,
even Dante would look around
the block and find no evidence
of hell. a group of young girls
sit perfectly still on the stoop of
a building with boarded windows
on the first floor, they look at me
leaning on the fire hydrant and I
smile, aware that everything does
not end.
Fire hydrant in the Bronx, NY, 2010. Photo: ChrisGoldNY
River Jordan
I weep for the men, women and
children murdered in harsh time,
no longer smelling the sweetness
of each fleeting day, lost forever
in a darkness that will never taste
love, removed from the world by
the devils who delightfully lock
gas chamber doors and mocked
by the malignant fools who
spend their time imagining the
triumph of injustice. I weep for
a society that repeatedly elects
lies shown in churches, schools,
courts, government and ordinary
streets with torrential contempt
for truth and flattery for those who
choke the witnesses against hate
and deceit to death. I weep for the
thin light of democracy that is stuffed
with the same bullshit the latest version
of sanitized history books use in schools
to refute the horrors of terrorized and slain
people. I weep without any tears left for
America’s denial of memory and for the
day crucified people will at last see God’s
messenger of mercy cover the world full of
hate with a blanket of flowers!
The Bronx River at Bronx Zoo, NY, 2007. The 24-mile river’s Native American name was the Aquahung before the arrival of European colonists like Jonas Bronck, for whom the Bronx and its river are named, in 1639. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the river became a natural sewer for industrial waste. Recently, action has been taken by different environmental groups, including the Bronx River Alliance, to return the river to its original state as a clean waterway. Photo and caption excerpt: Wally Gobetz
Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, NY, 2015. It is one of the largest cemeteries in New York City and a designated National Historic Landmark. Notable persons interred at Woodlawn include: Harlem Renaissance writer Countee Cullen; musicians Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, King Oliver, and Max Roach; and singers Celia Cruz and Florence Mills. Photo: Marcela McGreal
The Graves
Lord, you may hear the earthly
weeping and see your marvelous
light darkened by the heartless
judges who are tangled in lies,
crowned with white stupidity
and driven to keep racist wheels
in motion. Lord, undoing justice
is a national pastime belonging
to the people who say the rope
they carry over their shoulders
and the AR-15s in the hands of
white teens terrifyingly paraded
on the racial-protest streets prove
only a motivation for self-defense.
Lord, you may understand today
why many of us live in a state of
permanent rage, putting up with the
manipulations of the rule of law
making white supremacists shine
like the innocent and allowing them
to stand on the sinking earth of too
many cemeteries with their sardonic
grin. Lord, you know very well it
is time to tell history backward in
America about the weeping and dying
of Middle Passage and the slaughtered
Black lives you have seen for years on
the brutalizing shores of a nation not
right with you.
"In The Days You Bring, we walk the 'long walk' with Recinos through the barrio's streets, weeping unabashedly for its 'crucified people' and left to contemplate the 'horrifying obscenity of forgetfulness.’ Yet so, too, do we revel in its subtle raptures and improbable blossoms. Against the 'thick silence' of an indifferent world and the 'pious white lies' of history, The Days You Bring asks us, Can you hear the barrio's song? Its canto and hymns? Its 'unanswered prayers'?”
—Eric Morales-Franceschini, University of Georgia
