Margarita Engle
Sound Waves
In the Museum of Natural Sounds recordists preserve the final melodies of endangered birds the sigh of a leaf in murmuring rain just before a mountainous forest vanishes an eye of silence at the heart of a hurricane and mating calls the auditory shadow of DNA just in case one last golden toad survives in the cloud forest waiting to be summoned into a laboratory designed for the cloning of amphibious love songs.
The Biography of a Window
after Jorge Carrera Andrade The wind eye grows down from sky entering dark walls like an angel the root of birds breathed by air. Wind eyes speak in terrestrial constellations drawing housebound women toward glimpses of wild sunflowers that bow down to plant themselves along roads of light on dim earth. The window is an eyrie a sunspace sadjoy such a wistful combination of above and below. To all homebound women the kitchen wind eye gives a view of doves, a scent of gardens the child of visions born in sky.
Inventing Jewelry
Women roam hallways of ladders and boats salvaging clouds, fossils, sea shells and stone, the lichen still growing on a necklace that has to be watered with rain. The bracelet is made of old keys to lost doors that will never be opened. We drape the carved light of coral around necks and wrists, the growing stone of treelike creatures, branching from turquoise water and the submerged glow of sundreams.
Margarita Engle is the Cuban-American author of young adult novels in verse, most recently Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (Henry Holt & Co., 2009), and The Surrender Tree (Henry Holt & Co., 2008), a Newbery Honor Book, Pura Belpré Medal Winner, and Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Honor Book.
