Cinco de Mayo
- Cinco de Mayo
Alicia Ostriker, Mexican Independence, Poetry, cinco de mayo
What’s that mob in the playground where I meant to sit in sunshine read my book what’s that uproar P.S. 371 annual party a line for food a dozen miniature soccer games around the pool no rules backpacks of every hue parked on benches does nobody fear theirs will be stolen? Are we really in the city or am I dreaming three pretty mariachis singing “Cielito Lindo” and making the children and their mamacitas, brown and beige, sing along, everybody knows the words, indeed it is New York City Upper West Side Cinco de Mayo, querida they teach the children to dance “La cucaracha,” kick and shake and shriek, for it is Mexican Independence Day let the city employee hugging clipboard shake her hair loose and if two days ago I was shopping for ant traps and if three days ago I was fighting rush hour traffic, let there be traffic traffic in another world for here it is spring if we are ants crazy ants as I sometimes think see we are musical ants we are dancing ants [End Page 210]
Twice nominated for a National Book Award, alicia ostriker is author of twelve volumes of poetry, most recently The Book of Seventy, which won the Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Ostriker is the author of Writing Like a Woman and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America and several books on the Bible. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Antaeus, The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, the Atlantic, MS, Tikkun, and many other journals, and have been widely anthologized. Her poetry and essays have been translated into French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and Arabic.
