Click here for Oscar Bermeo’s audio recording of this poem.

After Federico García Lorca’s “Son de negros en Cuba”

I saw hip hop born right here in the Bronx.
Right here in the Bronx
Rouge project brick, our blank canvas.
Right here in the Bronx
Turntables sample, scratch, and sing.
Right here in the Bronx
Capoeira boogies down Grand Concourse,
Right here in the Bronx.
Right here in the Bronx,
I walk among the ashes.
Right here in the Bronx.
Armed with Albizu’s and Bolivar’s hammer,
Right here in the Bronx.
Orchard Beach foam, 4 Line tokens,
Right here in the Bronx.
The Boogie Down, rhythm of loaded dice!
Right here in the Bronx.
Ah, do the Wop! Ah, the Roof Top!
Right here in the Bronx.
Streetlamps flicker and hum. B-Boys. Cardboard flowers by the windowsill.
Right here in the Bronx.
Blunt and Bacardi on our breath
Right here in the Bronx.
My boombox wakes the dead
Right here in the Bronx.
Flames eat the fire escape
Right here in the Bronx.
August heat, government cheese,
Right here in the Bronx.
Ah, the sticky syrup of piragua juice!
Ah, the BX! Ah, break of haze and asphalt!
Right here in the Bronx.

 
 
Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx Oscar Bermeo is a 2004 BRIO Award-winning poet and founding curator of the Acentos Bronx Poetry Showcase. He now makes his home in Oakland, where he is the poetry editor for Tea Party magazine and lives with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes.

Bermeo’s poems have appeared in Achiote Seeds, In the Grove, The November 3rd Club, OCHO, Small Press Distribution’s New Lit Generation, Spindle, as well as in the anthologies From Page to Stage and Back Again (Wordsmith Press, 2004), I Just Hope It’s Lethal: Poems of Sadness, Madness, and Joy (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), Points Not Found: Writings on the Meaning of Place (Kearny Street Workshop Press, 2006), 12 Ways: An Anthology of the 2007 Intergenerational Writers Lab (Kearny Street Workshop Press, 2007), among others.