J.C. Todd
Learning a Language
The Lunas have fallen
in Chiapas, households
emptied before daybreak,
slaughtered in a cavern whose dark
could not hide their faces
from the torches of troops.
Not only those who bore
the name of Luna, but Cruz,
Hernandez, Garcia, Perez,
names like bright threads
tying off the ends of families.
Hearing them, all
fifty-one, infant to elder,
names whose cadence
is heel-tap and hand-clap,
I listen as my teacher said,
allowing the rhythm and sound
to change how I hear
so the shadow of my birth tongue
fades. Luna. In its light
I see their lives, their history
that, word by word, enters me.
“After hearing the litany of names of villagers murdered by paramilitaries in Chiapas, Mexico, I repeated them for days so they would not be disappeared. Thirty years ago, it was my first experience in bearing witness by saying the names. Since then I have written two books of poems addressing the traumas of oppression, Beyond Repair (Able Muse Press, 2021) and The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Books, 2018). For more background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiapas_conflict.” —J.C. Todd
J.C. Todd’s recent work addresses war trauma and women: Beyond Repair (2021), the Able Muse Press Poetry Book Award special selection, and The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Press, 2018), finalist for the 2019 Eric Hoffer Micropress Award. Winner of the 2016 International Literary Award in poetry and highly commended in the 2022 National Competition of the Poetry Society of UK, she has held fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Bemis Center and has published poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, Full Bleed, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals.