Strawberries
Strawberries
I’d always been told strawberries couldn’t grow
in Puerto Rico. We didn’t have the climate.
Up here on this finca, past the carcass
of Peñuelas’s petroleum past, where even
the hummingbirds are dizzy with height,
small strawberry studs slip off like beads
from a necklace on my tongue. The farmer picks
them gently from their fuzzy casing—warm
and tender from swallowing the world’s
beatings—as he shows us his budding coffee crop.
Crecemos el café bajo sombra.
I think of all the work we do in the shadows.
Rearing coffee under the sun is hurried
and stifles taste. Its flavor should be layered
like the rock that makes this mountain,
this mountain of an island.
All plants are carbon-husked patience.
But coffee is a slow birth, bean of push
that can take as long as four years to ripen.
Intercropped with bananas, papayas, and pyrethrum
to lure away pests, allow for just and solidary
growth, an abundant existence—this steep hill
of harvest is everything we’re slowly trying to become.
The farmer says after the hurricane, they lost
the majority of their coffee shrubs.
Seeds were swept away with all else.
Mass growers strike deals and offer seeds
so local farmers can grow to sell back to them.
We have to grow our own to be our own,
he smiles, splits open a coffee pod,
drops the pulpy body
in my hand and tells me to try it.
I’d always been told freedom would never come
for Puerto Rico. We didn’t have the climate.
I ask the farmer about the strawberries. Son silvestres,
he responds, and points to their beautiful excess.