A House Called Tomorrow by Alberto Ríos
A House Called Tomorrow
by Alberto Ríos
You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—
You are a hundred wild centuries
And fifteen, bringing with you
In every breath and in every step
Everyone who has come before you,
All the yous that you have been,
The mothers of your mother,
The fathers of your father.
If someone in your family tree was trouble,
A hundred were not:
The bad do not win—not finally,
No matter how loud they are.
We simply would not be here
If that were so.
You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.
You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forward
Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise. But think:
When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words—
It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.
From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,
The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:
That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,
Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.
Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.
Be good, then better. Write books. Cure disease.
Make us proud. Make yourself proud.
And those who came before you? When you hear thunder,
Hear it as their applause.
I got to travel on a bus with Alberto Rios through the Sonoran desert, his home country, and hear him talk about the poetry of place and read his words amidst the red sand as he talked about being of the borderlands. He is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Arizona, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and one of the most important voices in contemporary borderlands and Chicano literature. He grew up in Nogales, Arizona, the son of a Mexican father and an English mother, and his work engages consistently with bilingual and bicultural inheritance.
I love this poem for its intergenerational blessing and acknowledgment, the legacies we carry in our bloodstream and features and cultural inheritances. And then the call and understanding that what is ours to give into each day and every day is ourselves.
