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    Words Chosen for the Wall
    Words Chosen for the Wall
    Words Chosen for the Wall
    Ebook188 pages1 hour

    Words Chosen for the Wall

    By Harold J. Recinos

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    About this ebook

    Words Chosen for the Wall is poetry testifying to the deepest elements in the American dream casting a light on cultural diversity, experiences of exclusion and belonging, and the walls of dividing hostility in society. It explores new paths that leap for unity, empathy, and hope. In this collection, poems give voice to experiences in a divided world and reach for beauty, unity, and emotional clarity. Like graffiti on walls, the poems call out various and different kinds of abuses and visions of life to quote Eliot "at the still point of the turning world." Each poem creates a space for the reader to bring their own baggage to a setting that questions idealized notions of community by offering lyrical words that speak to realities that are often ignored, or worse, forgotten. In this work, poems guide readers to the terrain of imagination that is a fine tool for repairing what is broken in society and that ceaselessly pleads for a solidarity of difference. These poems motivate dreams of a different existence and decolonize the imagination from the limitations of a single culture and understanding of life together.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResource Publications
    Release dateJul 23, 2024
    ISBN9798385220045
    Words Chosen for the Wall
    Author

    Harold J. Recinos

    Harold J. Recinos is professor of church and society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Among his publications are Good News from the Barrio: Prophetic Witness for the Church (2006), Wading through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation (editor, 2011), Where the Sidewalks Meet (2022), The Days You Bring (2022) and The Looking Glass: Far and Near (2023). He completed his PhD with honors in cultural anthropology in 1993 from the American University in Washington, DC. Since the mid-1980s, Recinos has worked with the Salvadoran refugee community and with marginal communities in El Salvador on issues of human rights.

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      Book preview

      Words Chosen for the Wall - Harold J. Recinos

      Words Chosen for the Wall

      Harold J. Recinos

      Words Chosen for the Wall

      Copyright ©

      2024

      Harold J. Recinos. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      , Eugene, OR

      97401

      .

      Resource Publications

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      Eugene, OR

      97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback isbn: 979-8-3852-2002-1

      hardcover isbn: 979-8-3852-2003-8

      ebook isbn: 979-8-3852-2004-5

      version number 073024

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Superior

      The Islands

      Tyrants

      Treasure

      Gaza

      October

      Rivers

      Fine Day

      Evening

      Amor

      Decolonial

      New Americans

      Conversion

      Headstone

      Lady

      Migrant Child

      The Poor

      Tired

      Moon

      The Country

      Flea Market

      Awake

      Savior, Savior

      Return

      The Massacre

      Campesinos

      Self-Portrait

      Sacred Mother

      Restless

      Broken English Dream

      The Botanica

      Solitude

      The Knot

      Things

      The Steps

      Harlem Days

      The Morning

      Evening

      Speech

      The Junkie

      Hanging Out

      Together

      The Caravan

      The Gift

      The Martyr

      Silence

      The Trip

      Airport

      Baroque

      Waiting Room

      Zip Gun

      The Tenement

      The Letter

      The Backyard

      Flaco

      Machu Picchu

      Today

      Old Church

      The Nation

      The Cart

      The Skiff

      Sleep

      Waiting

      The Boy

      Homecoming

      The Bridge

      Kitchen Sink

      The Innocent

      Terror

      The Slaughter

      Words

      The End

      Night

      Shots

      The Story

      Moonlight

      Waiting

      River Bank

      Jimmy

      The Veteran

      Psalm 71

      Darkness

      Certainty

      The Child

      The Library

      Cloudy

      Christmas Carol

      Frosty

      Daughter

      Times Square

      Remember

      Abandoned

      Perspective

      Christmas

      Piety

      Nuestra Señora

      The Wall

      Seasonal Letter

      The Walk

      Lament

      Deus, ubi es

      New Year

      Waiting

      The Season

      Listen

      Potomac River

      Valentine’s Day

      Snowy Day

      Catholic School

      Americano

      The Visitor

      Breakfast

      Father

      Swimming Hole

      The Future

      Sunday

      The Stench

      The Walk

      The Boys

      Lost

      The Kids

      The Call

      Fashion

      Few Words

      Little Girl

      Love

      Confession

      Sleepless

      The Prison

      Books

      Sweetness

      Still Voice

      Twists

      Morning

      Crucifixion

      Mr. Ex-President

      Romero

      The Woods

      Speak

      Memory

      Touch

      El Salvador

      Faces

      Spanish Kind

      Vida

      Illness

      Disappeared

      Strange

      Citizens Beware

      For Heaven’s Sake

      Good Friday

      Jazz

      The Child

      The Block

      Piety

      Hidden

      "Words Chosen for the Wall is a conversation with country, oppressors, a silent God, love, and familia. Harold Recinos punches through the divide with the voice that stands with the wounded human. One moment you are walking along the river and the next on the edge of the earth at Machu Picchu, Recinos leaves no stone unturned in this collection, he throws everything at us, including the kitchen sink."

      —Edward Vidaurre

      Author of By Throat, by Miracle: New & Selected Poems

      "Amid prayers, protests, recollections, conjurings, and calls-to-action, Words Chosen for the Wall voices the particularities of a future archaeology for a world in ruin, where the wretched of the earth are not only given names but imprinted on public grounds. In this collection, Harold Recinos’s poetry knows that the story of the street also tells the story of the ‘living and everyone who now mourns.’"

      —Christopher Rey Pérez

      Author of gauguin’s notebook: a retrospective

      "In Words Chosen for the Wall, Harold Recinos sings an urban song of barrio youth who grapple against a nation intent on their destruction, while proudly tagging tenement walls with ‘Ora Pro Nobis!’ With rhythmic consistency, Recinos hews columnar stanzas that stand like lyrical candlesticks lit for Spanish Mass, like stipes of a bisected crucifix, like love letters inscribed on posts of cedar, pine, or cypress. With an interrogatory spirit and indelible voice, Recinos refines his poetics of Americana, class struggle, and Catholic liberation."

      —Diego Báez

      Author of Yaguareté White: Poems

      Like an archeologist excavating layers in the cartographies of memory, Harold Recinos weaves the reader into piercing stories of childhood and the communal lives of a people who forge life from death and wholeness from the shards of time. The poems of this book are to be contemplated, for they will reveal the world of the poor and of the God who is encountered in the tenements of New York City, in the villages of El Salvador, in the rubble of Gaza, and in every rejected place where holiness has pitched its tent and dwells.

      —Leo Guardado

      Author of Church as Sanctuary: Reconstructing Refuge in an Age of Forced Displacement

      "Thomas Merton states that when people ‘[live] out of touch with other people they tend to lose that deep sense of spiritual realities which only pure love can give.’ In Words Chosen for the Wall, Harold Recinos finds God has become elusive in churches oblivious to people’s lived realities. Recinos leads us in search for a God sometimes located where the marginalized congregate, where ‘herbs from their tiny villages’ are the greatest gifts."

      —Alma Rosa Alvarez

      Author of Liberation Theology in Chicana/o Literature: Manifestations of Feminist and Gay Identities

      Superior

      you claim to be superior

      in thought, goodness and

      color of skin. how peculiar

      it must be to live history

      inside a supreme fallacy that

      people like me who have stayed

      whole no matter how often

      you dangled us from trees or

      sliced us to pieces find thousands

      of ways to protest to rush the end

      of empire’s atrocities.

      The Islands

      I have lived on two islands

      for many years, one with a

      tropical sky beneath which

      old men pushed out to sea,

      another chiseled from steel

      and concrete both loud with

      the poor’s lamenting voices.

      I have found on them traces

      of suffering shaped by the

      Lords of the earth who never

      hear the frail wishes of those

      they chain and dreadfully hurt.

      I have breathed the air of two

      islands in neighborhoods that

      believe God knows things are

      wrong, searched for answers in

      the places petitioning for simple

      blessings and cursed the world

      where the creator of things ends

      sentences ordering deportation

      for women with braided hair, the

      kids with rosaries and young men

      who work harder than Adam and

      Eve ever believed possible. I have

      lived next to walls that have ears

      and whispered into them gathered

      dreams.

      Tyrants

      a republic made by the blood

      of the tired poor who suffer and

      labor for years with broken backs

      has no freedom to impart or light

      to overwhelm the darkness in its

      corridors of government. the tears

      of those not considered will only

      go on collecting in puddles as they

      have ever since God in big steeple

      churches decided not to say a word

      to the wretched of the earth who

      are not on speaking terms with a

      religion lacking love for the stomped,

      cursed, tortured, and killed. a republic

      that bends its knees to pray to a God

      that claps for executioners, the Herodian

      thugs nailing the poor to cheap wood

      trees, and

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