Tlaltecuhtli

Robert René Galván

Rent apart
by two serpents
to create the world,
her body became
the earth
and sky,
hair, the trees
and flowers;
springs
and fountains
flowed
from her eyes –
humanity expelled
with a grimace
from her haunches:
Only the blood
of men could appease
her for what she
sacrificed,
and temples
arose where
ceremonies
stained stones.
When the intruders
arrived, the monuments
were dismembered,
chiseled into columns
for convents,
her face planted
in the soil,
a surreptitious
song
while the monjas
chanted their
Ave Marias
above.
A millstone
was rendered
from her effigy,
a yoke
around
our necks.

Robert René Galván, born in San Antonio, resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet. His collections of poems are Meteors, published by Lux Nova Press and Undesirable: Race and Remembrance, Somos en Escrito Foundation Press, Standing Stones, Finishing Line Press and The Shadow of Time, Adelaide Books. His poetry was recently featured in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Azahares Literary Magazine, Gyroscope, Hawaii Review, Hispanic Culture Review, Newtown Review, Panoply, Prachya Review, Sequestrum, Shoreline of Infinity, Somos en Escrito, Stillwater Review, West Texas Literary Review, and the Winter 2018 issue of UU World. He is a Shortlist Winner Nominee in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Award for Best Poem. Recently, his poems are featured in Puro ChicanX Writers of the 21st Century (2nd Edition) and in Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought. His poems have been nominated for Best of Web and the Pushcart Prize. His poem, Awakening, was featured in the author’s voice on NPR as part of National Poetry Month in the Spring of 2021.