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Juan Felipe Herrera
1948 –

with design by Anthony Cody 

​grocery bags have a tendency to wobble / you can crash into the toy section / flaring stars create another star / the basketball will dunk you up / blushing will take you down / a chile bowl will wreak havoc by itself / freedom blossoms in all its colors / the power between us is magnificent / peace opens, rises and accelerates / fear dissolves and trust walks in / your tenderness opens its door / love flourishes for the first time / Healing begins

Copyright © 2020 by Juan Felipe Herrera. Design by Anthony Cody. Originally published with the Shelter in Poems initiative on poets.org. 

Juan Felipe Herrera
Photo credit: Randy Vaughn-Dotta

Juan Felipe Herrera was born in Fowler, California, on December 27, 1948. The son of migrant farmers, Herrera moved often, living in trailers or tents along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California. As a child, he attended school in a variety of small towns from San Francisco to San Diego. He began drawing cartoons while in middle school, and by high school was playing folk music by Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie.

About Juan Felipe Herrera

Themes
Anxiety
Apocalypse
Creation
About this Poem

“The solar circle poem can be read in any direction, or simultaneously with various voices at a ‘distance,’ or it can be cut out and spun like a wheel. You choose where to begin and end.”
—Juan Felipe Herrera

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More by this poet

Everyday We Get More Illegal

Yet the peach tree 
still rises
& falls with fruit & without
birds eat it the sparrows fight
our desert       

            burns with trash & drug
it also breathes & sprouts
vines & maguey

Juan Felipe Herrera
2011

breathe we

breathe for George Floyd we
 

breathe for compassion we

do not know what that is we
 

another black man holy we

gone now George Floyd we

Ahmaud running street endless we

America scream & love we
 

do not know what love is we

Juan Felipe Herrera
2020

María de la Luz Knows How to Walk

she ambles toward El Norte she remembers as she steps
wasps & spiders webbed in between the corn in Fowler
her mamá Concha’s story the fire she fanned to clear
the path through the thick burned stalks all this
she almost-touches the blueberries in Skagit Washington
& the line of men wrapped as cocoons and dark as amber
flecked honey at the line the only store in Firebaugh where
you can cash your check shirts twisted & whispered & upright
down in Illinois in Cobden you go through the back door

Juan Felipe Herrera
2017

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