Elegy for Gabo

by | Nov 25, 2020 | Poetry

for Gabriel García Márquez

Did you wear the black shoes,
the patent leather ones?

The streets are clean
where you are going, or
so they say.

Gabo, take a little detour
down this fine powder road,
to the wooden shack
where the beers are colder
than cruelty.

All the tables & chairs are dressed
in cheesecloth, the lovers,

sex workers, & soldiers you fathered
wait to smell your cologne one last time.

Please come for the day,
I am roasting a pig in a matchbox,
the village tailor is making
a suit for you—out of palm leaves.
The colonel organized a parade,

we are naming the town after you
follow me down the road.

It is here, just the way you wrote it,
vamos Gabo, come back to us.

 

ELEGY FOR GABO by Roberto Carlos Garcia

 

 

Photo used under CC. 

About The Author

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Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is a self-described “sancocho […] of provisions from the Harlem Renaissance, the Spanish Poets of 1929, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican School, and the Modernists.” Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, conveying “nakedness of emotion, intent, and experience,” and he writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. [Elegies], Roberto’s third poetry collection will be available December 2020 from FlowerSong Press. His second poetry collection, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books. Roberto’s first collection, Melancolía, is available from Červená Barva Press.

His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The Root, Those People, Rigorous, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Gawker, Barrelhouse, The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket, and many others.

He is founder of the cooperative press Get Fresh Books Publishing, A NonProfit Corp.

A native New Yorker, Roberto holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation from Drew University, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.