POETRY - The Ancestors Are Singing - Tony Johnston

Illustrated by Karen Barbour
2003, Farrar Straus Giroux
Goodreads rating 3.25
My rating: 4
64 pages
Illustrations:  pen & ink

Poems of Mexico, past and present, with references to Mayans and Aztecs, so fits in perfectly to my 4th grade studies. Some great examples follow:


Storms in Oaxaca ( pronounciation: Wuh-Hah-Kuh)

The great saguaro shivers
in the cold.
It holds out its thick and prickly arms
to feel slivers of shining
rain.
Tall and alone it stands
and gathers light from strikes of raving
lightning.
When the land is dry, the saguaro remembers
storms.

Rabbit in the Moon

Old and clever one,
how I wish I had been there
on the night that you leaped
into the sky.
How I wish I had seen you spark
your silver trail
like a comet with long ears
across the dark.
Oh, how I wish I had been there ---
and looked up.

Old Palaces

Beneath the jungle canopy of trees,
old palaces fill the silence with old dreams,
alone except when splendid golden gleams
of jaguars come to rest upon their bones ---
or when bats, velvet gods of long ago,
cluster in their crumbling roof combs.
The ancient trees stand, green as quetzal plumes.
The fearsome kings are gone.  Stones speak to stones.

Museum of Anthropology
(for Pedro Ramirez Vazquez)

In the silence of the splendid galleries
Ethecatl, god of wind,
stands forever entwined
with a slender snake.
Alongside a mute clay
flute,
a wooden Aztec drum
rests, stilled
as if it had never
beat.
Mezcala figurines 
carved in green stone
sit gazing at old starts beyond 
the ceiling.

In the courtyard 
beneath a stone pillar
streaming
with musical water,
the Ancestors are
singing.