Juan Carlos Galeano's "History"

Poem of the Week:  Juan Carlos Galeano          History In the north we hunted many buffalo whose lard warmed us all winter. But in the jungle they told us that to bring more light we should throw more trees into the sun's furnace. One day our hand slipped and tossed in the entire jungle with its birds, fish, and rivers. Now we spend a lot of time gazing at the stars and our daily menu almost never changes. Today we hunted down a cloud that was going to become winter in New York City *** From The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura Gray Street. (Trinity University Press, San Antonio, Texas.) Used by permission. JUAN CARLOS GALEANO was born in the Colombian Amazon. He is the author of several books of poetry and translations of American poetry. His work inspired by Amazonian cosmologies has been published and anthologized internationally and widely translated. Magazines and journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Field, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly,and Antioch Review have published his poems. Other works include a collection of folktales Cuentos amazónicos (2014), Folktales of the Amazon (2009), as well as a film he co-directed and co-produced, The Trees Have a Mother (2008). He teaches Latin American poetry and cultures of the Amazon at Florida State University. ***     We strive to preserve the text formatting of poems over e-mail, but certain e-mail programs may distort how characters, fonts, indents, and line wraps appear. View the poem on our site. Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!    If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive. Support Split This Rock  Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor. Split This Rock www.SplitThisRock.org 202-787-5210 info@splitthisrock.org