On Protest as Love Poem by Huascar Medina
By Linzi Garcia, Meadowlark Press
Hello and happy summer, Radio Readers! Linzi Garcia from Emporia, Kansas, here. I work as poetry editor and publicist for Meadowlark Press, a small, regional press specializing in Midwest voices. There’s a book that we published earlier this year that I can’t get out of my head, and I really want to tell you about it.
Protest as Love Poem is a poetry collection written by Huascar Medina, who was our poet laureate of Kansas from 2019-2022. He is also the author of How to Hang the Moon and Un Mango Grows in Kansas, published by Spartan Press. Medina is a powerhouse when it comes to using poetry as a way to build community and empower people to use their voices to stand up for what’s right. That is exactly what this book does.
These poems are a call for personal reflection and political revolution. They are tender, and they are fierce. They fight evil and injustice with love and stoke the fire in us to do that, too. Born from personal experience and centralized among a nation with populations being treated unfairly and unjustly, this collection confronts issues of gentrification, economic disparity, detrimental effects of apathy, and other modern issues.
This book simultaneously critiques historic and contemporary issues in America while also maintaining the glimmer of hope for love and righteousness to prevail.
Let me show you what I mean. Here is the title poem, “Protest as Love Poem.”
I wish for a time when every other poem isn’t about us fighting for our bodies.
Not about creating space for our bodies,
Not about rediscovering displaced bodies,
Not about accepting rejected bodies,
Not about reclaiming stolen bodies,
Not about healing bodies,
Not about protecting our bodies,
Not about saving dying bodies,
Not about mourning murdered bodies,
Not about the body politic.
I wish for a time when every poem is for everyone.
So I could write you a love poem without feeling
selfish. Without loathing the fact that it won’t
save anybody outside of us, and even that feels
questionable.
These poems are necessary in a time like this, when People of Color are made to feel unsafe in their own homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces. Bringing awareness to these issues through poetry peels back the impersonal to reveal the humanity. These poems and these topics must be spoken about and read about, so we can understand and advocate for our brothers and sisters.
While these poems of resilience and survival are urgent and brave, they are also tired in their pleas for betterment. In the poem, “Lessons in Spanglish,” Medina plays on the Spanish word “cansado,” with a c, which means “tired,” and writes, “Kansado,” with a K, defining it, in part, as: “a fatigued / Kansan . . . Specifically, a Latino trying to live / in peace in Kansas.” As a Latino Kansan, Medina is one of many who carries this weight. At the same time, he carries the beauty and brilliance of Kansas and its people, writing, “Do you remember when we danced in the fields at / Grinter Farms? The air covered our song, and we / floated on a sea of sunflowers. // That day, I swore the sunset turned us into butterflies.” Let us help lighten the load by working together for the common good and by cherishing the goodness and beauty that does exist.
Protest as Love Poem reminds us that we each have power and requests us to use it to make a positive difference. If you’d like a copy for yourself, I encourage you to get it from your favorite local bookstore.
Thanks for listening. This is Linzi Garcia for High Plains Public Radio Reader's Book Club's Summer Reading List.
[Editor’s Note: Huascar Medina is the Kansas Host Poet for Season Three of HPPR’s Poets on the Plains heard each Thursday near 11:30 a.m. on High Plains Morning. Find more at https://www.hppr.org/podcast/hppr-poets-on-the-plains
Linzi Garcia is an auntie, the poetry editor at Meadowlark Press, and the director of the Diverse Voices Literacy Program through House of Morrow. She is the author of Thank You, Cravings, and Wanderers and the co-author of Live a Great Story and While Away: Travel Poems. Linzi is a recipient of a NextGen Under 30 Kansas Award and Kansas Governor’s Arts Award.
