The Gulf of California

Painting and Poetry by Anita Endrezze

The Gulf of California


Then it was named the Vermilion Sea
when the red-shelled crabs clicked in the wake.
It was named the Sea of Cortez
because it is the right of the Conqueror
to claim the world in his name.

It's his right to name hunger after himself
and to take away rivers
and children
and to give back the bare bones
of life
in the Queen's name.

What can you say about men
who name the mountains "mother"
madre,
when the worst curse they can shout
defiles their mother
in the act of creation?

Now we call the Gulf of California
polluted
by the pesticides of fields,
and the wastes of factories.
And the voices of the fin-backed whale,
sardines, sea-kelp, anemone,
and turtles are quieter,
so that we have less memory
of the way it was,
and less hope
for the way it will be.

In the winter I eat strawberries
from Mexico,
and oranges, sectioned and split
apart
on my north continental plate.
I don't know much about my relatives
picking fields near Bacum, Texas.


Anita Endrezze.....from The Navel of the Moon.