City of Forgiveness

City of Forgiveness

"It is a good time to be a poet, I think, but the pay is shitty."
--Bobby Byrd


Every time I drive to the El Paso airport I am startled
by John Hauser's don Juan Oñate rearing up
on an oversized Spanish mustang—
“the world’s largest equestrian statue.”
Hauser was into exact realism,
so driving almost under the hooves of the thing,
it’s impossible to ignore the mustang’s gargantuan package
hanging like a wet dream gone terribly bad

Oñate was a good Catholic boy, even if in 1599
he earned the nickname of “the Butcher at Acoma”
for ordering the masacre at the pueblo,
killing 800, enslaving 500 women and children,
and cutting off the right foot of every remaining
able-bodied man in the pueblo.
Not to worry. He boasted pure Spanish blood.

Not like that Benito Juárez indio guy.

Not like that meztizo vato Pancho Villa.

I have a friend, poet Simon Ortiz of the Acoma Pueblo,
who talks about how the dark shadow of Oñate
and his butchery still reverberates through the oral history
of his people’s language and stories.

Oh well. Hauser’s Oñate has become a fact of life
for us here in El Paso. It’s not going to come down.
Still, I have a secret wish.

I wish we could cut off Oñate’s right foot.
Not in the dead of night.
No, I want to have a huge ceremony
and invite the Governor of Acoma to El Paso.
I want to invite Simon Ortiz to write and read a poem
for the occasion. A poem that will honor the dead of Acoma,
a poem that will honor the history of the pueblo peoples,
a poem that will honor the land we live on,
a poem that will honor our common future.

After Simon has read his poem
and we all have tears in our eyes,
I want the mayor of El Paso
to give the Governor of Acoma
a large blowtorch and I want him to cut off
the statue’s right foot. I want it to fall thud
to the ground amid cheers and sadness and prayers.

Then I want a powwow to begin.
Maybe we can call it “Cutting Off the Butcher’s Foot Powwow.”
Or maybe we can call it the “Asking for Forgiveness Powwow.”
We’ll figure out something.
The important thing is that we invite all the Fancy Dancers,
the Traditional Dancers, the Grass Dancers, the drummers
and the singers—the drums will pound
and the songs will wail at the moon
and the beating of feet will pound into the desert night.

Vendors will be selling snow cones and churros and elotes,
tacos and hamburgers and sodas and Oñate piñatas.
No booze, no dope. Those are the rules.
That’s because all of the Kachinas and the holy clowns
will be there, watching us. Our Lady of Guadalupe too.
She’ll be wearing cowboy boots and a big smile.
We’ll invite Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed.
They'll be hanging out in the shadows,
mumbling about the uselessness of words.

At midnight, holding hands and dancing around the circle,
the big drums still pounding,
we will melt the Spaniard’s foot.
The molten bronze will seep steaming into a cauldron.

Hauser, like Sisyphus doing his existential
but very sacred chore of pushing the rock up the hill,
will recast and re-attach the foot
so that the next year we can re-enact the ceremony.
He will be well-paid and he will have a studio to work
on other projects. The festival will become
a huge annual fair.
El Paso will become known as the City of Forgiveness.
The federal government will tear down its ugly fence,
the drug war will become history
and peace will be declared in Juárez.

I wish.


Bobby Byrd February 2009
Prose by Bobby Byrd
Linebreaks by Glenn Buttkus