Virgil Suarez
Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1962, and moved to the United States in 1974. He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 1987 from Louisiana State University. His books of poetry include: Guide to the Blue Tongue(University of Illinois Press, 2002);Banyan (2001), for which he won the Book Expo America/Latino Literature Hall of Fame Poetry Prize; In the Republic of Longing (1999); Garabato Poems(1999); and You Come Singing (1998). He is also a novelist, and has written about his experience as a Cuban refugee and a Cuban-American in his memoirs Infinite Refuge (Arte Público Press, 2002) and Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban-American Childhood (1997). His work has been included in many anthologies, such as Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets (2002).
Suárez has achieved such distinctions as the Florida State Individual Artist Grant, a G. MacCarthur Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. He has acted as a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Panelist in 2000 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Panel/Judge in 1999. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where he is an associate professor of creative writing at Florida State University, Tallahassee.
Suárez has achieved such distinctions as the Florida State Individual Artist Grant, a G. MacCarthur Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. He has acted as a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Panelist in 2000 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Panel/Judge in 1999. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where he is an associate professor of creative writing at Florida State University, Tallahassee.
"The Stayer"
Simply, my uncle Chicho stayed
back in Cuba, against the family’s
advice, because everyone left
And he chose to stay, and this act
of staying marked him as “crazy”
with most of the men, and he stayed
there in a shack behind my aunt’s
clapboard house, sat in the dark
of most days in the middle
of the packed-dirt floor and nodded
at the insistence of light, the way
it darted through holes in the tin
roof where the rain drummed
like the gallop of spooked horses.
This is where he was born, he chanted
under his breath to no one, why should
he leave, live in perpetual longing
within exile? He learned long ago
to count the passing of time
in how motes danced in the shaft (motes: specks of dust.)
of white light, the chicharras echoed (chicharras: cicades, insects that create loud buzzing noises.)
their trill against the emptiness
of life, against the wake of resistance
in this place he knew as a child,
as a man, un hombre, bend against the idea
of leaving his country, call him loco. (loco: crazy.)
What nobody counted on was that answers
come on to those who sit in the
quiet of their own countries, tranquil
in the penumbra, intent on hearing the song (penumbra (pih NUHM bruh): half shadow)
of a tomequin as it calls for a mate (tomequin: a small bird that is native to Cuba.)
to come next in the shrubs out there,
while in here, he witnesses how light
fills the emptiness with the meaning of stay.