This land is your land,
this land is Comanche land,
Mescalero Apache land,
Coahuiltecan land, my ancestors—
bent to build the Alamo, then slaughtered
and buried beneath it, risen again, to be forgotten,
now a river to be walked upon, treaded by tourists,
on a mission, who find San Antonio a city
with two thighs, good only for entering and exiting.
This land is my grandfather’s land
whipped to suffer his color in the cumin air,
to erase that he ever loved, the way only a brown boy
can love Brownsville, beneath oil derricks
and sugarcane horizons, and fields
of afterthought, a cluster of cancerous
lovers in the wake of red dust, and pick-up truck
envy, never again, this land, never—
This Land looks better in the rearview,
better under night’s speckled eye,
better in the black sputum
of its horny oceanic spills, better under
the fog of hurricanes, or the distant plano-myth
of its own romantic promise, this land
is your Matanza land, your prideful legacy
of mounted Rangers by dawn’s zealot light land,
mass unmarked graves, and tales of a nascent Amerika
on the come up, your Corpse of Christ land,
that tore the tongue from my grandmother’s
tender jaw, this is your inheritance, not the land
but the stories of land, this land is your prideful misnomer,
keep this land, bury yourself here, deep in the heart
of your taxidermied glory, of your nostalgic West,
no amount of sermons from your mega-preachers
can undo how vast hexes span.
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Excerpted from Some of the Light: New and Selected Poems by Tim Z. Hernandez (Beacon Press, 2023). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
