Two Poems by Jorge Sánchez

Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected two poems by Jorge Sánchez for his series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.

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Recollections of the Stork

Perhaps the daffy, gawkiness of him
is the engine that whirrs and allows flight?
His song a hyoshigi, den­-den daiko,
kokiriko call. His house mikoshi
borne aloft. And atop that house, a phoenix.

The sun’s motion across the sky affects nothing,
the stork’s flight of constant length, the shadow
it casts on canoes, the time a father lives
or how long the water seems glassy,
stork legs in deep water, ahead of the boat.

In Western Michigan

Why call a river Grand when it is so
cold, skin roiling like a geyser, the birds
speaking a kind of French only Germans
understand? The drift is something like
a kingdom floating on the foam of day,
the hand of a friend seen so far ahead
in time as to be time gone, time before.

Here I might sit for all of time, the days
become hours, minutes becoming seconds,
a backyard or a bar you could never stand,
better than an enormous green sward
with a single space to make it important
(to me, at least) and a place that might hold
the light of some ceaseless sun, forever.

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Cuban-American fiction writer, teacher, essayist, and poet Jorge Sánchez was born in Hialeah, Florida, and raised in Miami. He earned a BA from Loyola University, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and an MA from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Sánchez teaches at Elgin Academy in Elgin, Illinois, and lives in Chicago with his wife and son.