“You named me big river, drew me—blue,
thick to divide, to say: spic and Yankee,
to say: wetback and gringo. You split me
in two—half of me us, the rest them. But
I wasn’t meant to drown children, hear
mothers’ cries, never meant to be your
geography: a line, a border, a murderer.”
–“Complaint of El Río Grande“, by Richard Blanco, a poem too beautiful not to share with OhioHabla followers.
This poem comes from Blanco’s How to Love a Country, a collection of poems that explore topics such as immigration, violence, racism, and LGBTQ experiences.
To learn more about the author, listen to the On Being episode in which he is interviewed.