Bent to the Earth by Blas Manuel De Luna

Bent to the Earth

by Blas Manuel De Luna

They had hit Ruben

with the high beams, had blinded

him so that the van

he was driving, full of Mexicans

going to pick tomatoes,

would have to stop. Ruben spun

the van into an irrigation ditch,

spun the five-year-old me awake

to immigration officers,

their batons already out,

already looking for the soft spots on the body,

to my mother being handcuffed

and dragged to a van, to my father

trying to show them our green cards.

They let us go. But Alvaro

was going back.

So was his brother Fernando.

So was their sister Sonia. Their mother

did not escape,

and so was going back. Their father

was somewhere in the field,

and was free. There were no great truths

revealed to me then. No wisdom

given to me by anyone. I was a child

who had seen what a piece of polished wood

could do to a face, who had seen his father

about to lose the one he loved, who had lost

some friends who would never return,

who, later that morning, bent

to the earth and went to work.

Although the speaker in this poem states, in stanzas 3-4, "There were no great truths revealed to me then," this entire poem is a truth, is it not? And terribly, horribly still relevant and necessary, rather than historical.

The poem begins with a startling image and a clever line break:

They had hit Ruben

with the high beams . . .

The violence is yet to come. And when it comes, it comes quickly. Ruben is forced to stop the van (crash it? he is, after all, blinded, and then the vehicle spins out). The immigration officers not only have their weapons at the ready, the speaker tells us they are also eyeing the parts of the bodies they have just waylaid for the places that are soft. Attacking soft body parts causes severe pain and can result in loss of function. Meanwhile, the speaker is experiencing psychological pain--he sees his mother handcuffed.

He and his parents are let go--they have green cards. The third stanza lists what happens to the others in that van--they are all sent back except for one man who had escaped into a field. He is, however, now without his family.

The last sentence of this poem is 6 1/2 lines long. It includes violence and suffering, an almost unspeakable heartache. And it ends in a reality for so many people in this country, for the people here from other places who work hard and are subjected to terror. Their morning ride is interrupted by immigration officers and the ones who are not arrested and detained then get into the fields and go to work.

This poem is a great example of the power a poem has when it does not preach, it does not explain, it does not attempt to solve anything, and it does not tell the reader how to think about a subject. It describes one specific incident using specific details. That is a much stronger way of creating a powerful poem and convincing readers of something as opposed to writing a poem called Immigrants and writing a diatribe broken into lines. Poetry is at its best when it looks at an incident and presents it with description. And this poem does just that--it is an amazing piece from Blas Manuel De Luna's book of the same name from 2006, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.