I AM PUERTO RICO

by Kathleen A. Lawrence

I am not an island
 surrounded by big water 
but shimmering shores
 lapped by the tears of my people

I am not a dirty barrio
but a street strung 
with a clothesline filled
with aprons and smocks

I am not mud caked
 but the color of rich clay 
and sparkling amber gemstones

I am not a gray swirl of storm
but a lovely ocean breeze

I am a centipede with countless legs
moving together to make repairs

I am the evening breeze
whistling come home

I am the chartreuse fern
bowing to our emerald palms

I am the indigo sky
 fluttering like a dancing petticoat

I am the contented sigh
 in our silver-edged moonrise

I am the sweetness
 of our plump, clementine sun

I am joyful as I play
hide and seek behind
our rolling, laughing hills

I am strong like the backs of our beetles
I am flying with rainbow wings
 I am as quick as our waterfalls
I am as spirited as the acid green coqui

I am Puerto Rico
 

Kathleen A. Lawrence has had poems published in Rattle (Poets Respond), Eye to the Telescope, Scryptic, Silver Birch Press, haikuniverse, Silver Blade Magazine, The Wild Word Magazine (Germany), Altered Reality Magazine, Undertow Tanka Review, Silver Blade Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, among others. Recently two of her poems were nominated for 2017 Best of the Net awards, and another was nominated for the 2017 Rhysling Award of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). In 2016 she won third place for “Even Happy Ghosts are Scary Ghosts When You’re Seven” in the SFPA poetry