Born in New Mexico of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his 
grandmother and was later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age thirteen, it was after Baca was 
sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison at the age of twenty-one that he began to turn 
his life around: there he learned to read and write and found his passion for poetry.  He is the winner of 
the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the National Poetry Award, the International Hispanic 
Heritage Award, and, for his memoir A Place To Stand, the prestigious International Award.  

Baca has two new books released March 2004: The Importance of a Piece of Paper (Grove/Atlantic) 
and Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (New Directions).

His books also include: A Place to Stand, Healing Earthquakes, C-Train & Thirteen Mexicans, 
Black Mesa Poems, Martin & Meditations on the South Valley, and Immigrants in Our Own Land.   

Movie scripts and productions include Bound by Honor (Blood In, Blood Out), Hollywood Pictures/Disney, 
and The Lone Wolf – The Story of Pancho Gonzalez, HBO Productions.
 

From  "Healing Earthquakes" 

Ten

Lisana, it started with you in the garden 
absorbing the warm morning sunlight
in shorts, tank top, barefoot,
	raking the moist soil
	and pulling weeds, moulding up dirt
		   around the rosebushes.
	What were you thinking,
	what cool stones of thoughts washed ashore
	in your blood from loving you last night?
Those stones you circled around our rosebush
were satisfied with the deep current of our affection,
how my lips and hands and legs and arms
wash over you 
	wading out into me, seeking the shallows 
	where you can reach down beneath my blood
	and pick up rocks that delight you.
My blood, like any river, has gouged out pools
and cut in the banks
	     remapping its journey.

None of this did I intend to say.
I want to focus on our journey together,
staring in the garden,
	started with a seed
	in the moist soil,
	with raking the dirt smooth 
	with watering the well
		with watching it from my window
			grow.





Thirteen 

A hundred yards beyond my house
the Rio Grande’s cottonwoods
burst with gold. Leaves fly through the air-

	dusty air,  as if the winds were trail busters,
	old exhausted cowboys
	driving invisible herds of dead buffaloes 
	stampeding treetops.

Leaves 
explode in the air and swirl down
like golden raindrops
flooding dirt streets,
puddling in doorways and collecting in roof wedges.

	 When asked 
		        Where do you come from?

I want to say I was born 
from a leaf in the bosque.
On a November afternoon like today
my soul was formed in the mad swirlings of dying leaves
shattering against a rickety post fence,
dispensing over the barrio
to crumble and rot in the earth.

	But I am locked in by my flesh-
	by the walls and doors
	of my house. Here I cling
	to my family, to this house,
	to the fence they know
	and words they know are mine, I cling
	fighting off the autumn winds and cold-

O, but just to let go,
to let a roaring dawn take me
and fling me over the river, blow me back
and find myself floating in the brown water
toward nowhere-
	to die, to renew myself
	in black bog-
uncurl my eyes again like two buds
to light again!
Green tongue veined with maps
insects eat through, spiders web, caterpillars chew-
until one day I awake a butterfly
letting my daughter chase me
through an alfalfa field as she does now.