They’ve started a tight salsa
when Elisa strolls on, hips round as a drum.
Her band whoops, edges up the percussion
and the bass whips her calves.
She looks at each woman, remembering
how she brought them together,
their babies now workers, mothers,
or fathers, grins at the years they display
in their breasts, waists and eyes,
one thousand, three hundred and three.
She nods to Aleida on congas holding rivers
in her palms and Mathilda, the oldest,
on rhythm guitar, playing just as she’s waited
in a chair by the door, night after night all her life.
Elisa turns to the room, finds the President’s table,
puts a mike to her mouth.
“For this man tonight, twenty lovers,” she jokes
and her eyes won’t leave as she sings
of sun in the citrus, Batista,
all the sweat and fists in the wind,
of a child in a cellar, paths through the cane,
the wings on every island’s shoulder blades.
She sings of the speeches scrolled in his pockets,
of Angola, Mandela, his friend.
She sings of Havana, how it still burns
on maps of the world,
of Martí’s white rose and an exile’s return
to the Island of Youth.
Then she picks up the claves and the crowd
shines the floor with its footwork,
as they dance the way heat breaks
the line of a road, each beat and bell of the salsa,
a gasp in the hand.
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