Two Poems by Vibiana Aparicio-Chamberlin

The Prayer Book

Written ‘In Synergy’ with Ways of Knowing by Isabel Avila

Library, do you hold little books
bound in white with gold painted
crosses engraved on their covers?
The kind children receive on their
First Holy Communion Day.

I gave birth to my son at 10:01 am.
And I learned the meaning of life.
I only thought of love, of life and
never, never of their opposites.

At age four, my son asked me.
“Mommy, what is love?”
At age six, he asked.
“Mommy, what is to die?”

Answer me, library of sanguine
and brown leather bound books
with gold painted edges.
Answer, library of catalogued
books with labels of strange letters
and numbers glued onto your edges.

Books stacked claustrophobic,
open your pages.
Please answer his questions.
“What is love? What is to die?”

Stories of life and death–
tell it so he’ll understand.
Open your pages to stories
of our ancestors
of our roots that
hold firmly anchored
to the rocks
to the seasons
to the passing of time
to the daily ritual
of sunrise and sunset.

River rocks, a circle of prayer
under your library built of books–
There, at the prayer circle
elders answered the questions.
What is Love?
What is to die?

The light of the moon and the sun,
the same light of thousands of years–
shines a way to the journey forward.

A prayer book consoled
my child of age six till
the day he passed to the light
at age fifty-three.

He found the words
from a foggy memory
of the prayer book
of long ago.

Hail Mary
Full of Grace
He whispered on his
moment of passing.

Hail Mary
I saw his spirit a light
so peacefully go
into the celestial
night sky at 10:01 p.m.

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Where the Rivers Meet

Written ‘In Synergy’ with Moon Tree by Karen Bagnard

Come to me.
I hold you in my grasp.
Blood streams together.
We are one.

engorged with liquid
for you, my children
of the eight villages.

I come from the center
of the world where my umbilical
cord is attached at the place
where the Yaqui Rivers meet.

 See me in your dreams.
Cross to the other side of the river
where I wait for you
where I yearn to embrace you
in the next world.

My one desire is to join you–
ecstatic, corpuscle by corpuscle,
cell-by-cell. Come and pass
by osmosis to me through
my inner trunk, my cambium.

For you, I steal my sister moon.
My fingers stretch. I scratch the
cobalt sky and grasp her.
I lure you with the blinding sight of
her, the Yaqui moon goddess who
I imprison in my branched hair.

Up the river you stream through my roots,
deep inside the velvet of my gnarled trunk.
You explode up into my aged branches

Sister Moon, I sing to you.
Arru ru arru ru
Luna de leche.
Help me nurse the children
with milk from the entrails
of my branches, my trunk,
my sap and roots.

I clasp you to me.
I embrace us.
Then the night comes when
my finger tips itch and
I feel a painful shudder.
I scream out a howl and
sing a coyote’s song.

The stars dance in a fury
Of lights that make music
for the dancing of the cocoon bells.
The tenevoim bells are tied around the
ankles of Yaqui dancers.

My Yoemem burst out from my
fingered branches into the dark sky.
My Yoemem fly up as deer dancers.
My branches become their antlers

For this, you cross the waterway
from all parts of Sonora.
I need you. You need you.
On dying you cross the river.
Come to me, your mother tree.
Where the Yaqui rivers meet.

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