To wrap up 2019, Connor and Jack take on a poem as exquisite in its craft as it is emotionally forceful in its effect on the reader. They discuss the history of the United States' colonial expansion, the danger of using oblique language when writing history, and the way the poem's tone bridges the gap between the past and present. More about Luis J. Rodriguez, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/luis-j-rodriguez Cinco de Mayo By: Luis J. Rodriguez Cinco de Mayo celebrates a burning people, those whose land is starved of blood, civilizations which are no longer holders of the night. We reconquer with our feet, with our tongues, that dangerous language, saying more of this world than the volumes of textured and controlled words on a page. We are the gentle rage; our hands hold the stream of the earth, the flowers of dead cities, the green of butterfly wings. Cinco de Mayo is about the barefoot, the untooled, the warriors of want who took on the greatest army Europe ever mustered—and won. I once saw a Mexican man stretched across an upturned sidewalk near Chicago's 18th and Bishop one fifth of May day. He brought up a near-empty bottle to the withering sky and yelled out a grito with the words: ¡Que viva Cinco de Mayo! And I knew then what it meant— what it meant for barefoot Zapoteca indigenas in the Battle of Puebla and what it meant for me there on 18th Street among los ancianos, the moon-faced children and futureless youth dodging the gunfire and careening battered cars, and it brought me to that war that never ends, the war Cinco de Mayo was a battle of, that I keep fighting, that we keep bleeding for, that war against a servitude that a compa on 18th Street knew all about as he crawled inside a bottle of the meanest Mexican spirits. Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking  Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking  Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected].

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