British poet, musician and inveterate traveler Neil Graham has spent time all over southeastern Mexico, from Yucatán to Oaxaca, observing its landscapes, talking to its people and feeling the rhythms of daily life among Mexicans in cities and small towns.
When he agreed to share some of his poetry about Mexico with us, we immediately said yes, pleased also that it came as a package deal with art by Mexican photographer and visual creator Andrea Quintero Olivas, whose work captures her country at times with stark realism and at times with dreamlike beauty. If you have spent any extended amount of time here in Mexico, you’ll find below words and images that will seem at once both familiar and new, views of the unseen. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.
Acatzingo: Dreamfields
Its dusty brown frame blends with the ochre wall
Allowing the desolate plains to stretch into the room
A cadre of horses rush the ground
Brown, black and white
Their twitching muscular legs like pistons
Working their riderless bodies
Running from or to somewhere.
At a cantina by a highway
A young man and young woman sit
While truck drivers drink micheladas and play cards in the baking November heat.
Thank you for taking me here, it’s beautiful.
It’s not a problem, not many people like you come here.
An abandoned capilla stands confused above the town
Its contents pristine behind the rusting town limit sign –
ACATZINGO.
Why not?
People think it’s unsafe.
Why?
Because of robberies. But they only happen on the highway. At night.
The Picos de Orizaba encircle the town and shimmer in the mirage of the road which sleeps beneath the charge of giant trucks.
Would you live here always?
I want to live in a place with human rights.
Where would you go?
I love Mexico.
They lift their beer glasses from a wooden table
Etched with names, obscenities and PALESTINA LIBRE.
What have you been doing since I last saw you?
Working. I work seven days a week. But I did go to Dreamfields. There were many famous DJs.
Would you like to be famous?
I don’t think like that.
The light wanes and truck engines neigh as they rush past the quiet steadiness of their conversation.
What does your father do?
He makes car parts.
And your brother?
Same. A lot of men work with machines here.
He’s young to be a father.
Maybe.
What is his tattoo?
Quetzacoatl. It’s getting dark. We should get you to your bus.
The blood orange sun bleeds its last light over the silent prairies of Puebla and then Morelos
He sees it as a god from his bus window and sleeps and wakes and dreams and wakes to find himself in
ACATZINGO
Beneath the painting of the horses on the plains.
San Cristobel de las Casas: Barrio Cuxtitali
The rain’s soft patter cleans the silence off the cobbled streets
Then two women in shaggy black wool skirts
Laugh joyfully
Joking in tzotzil
While coke bottles hum in the fridges of makeshift tiendas.
Mist stretches over the mountains like the creeping hands of a sky-god clutching the jungle for purchase
To look over the town at two thousand feet.
The women laugh louder.
A stray dog lifts its muzzle to stare blankly down the undulating roads
He gives up his search and rests his head over the curb
Nearby, a cross stands solitary beneath a spider’s web of telephone wires.
The women still laughing.
Sun breaks through the grey mist and illuminates an ascendent white cloud
A hummingbird flits between my sternum and my skull
And I walk home
With my eggs and tuna cans
Smiling.
Puerto Escondido: El Faro
On the headland
Tall and watchful
Like a father
There is a lighthouse –
In mourning
He sees it now in the evening fade
Silhouetted in the curve of the bay
By a burning crimson throb of light
Rimmed with orange
Dimming into pink
Then blue –
Colossal clouds like dancing edifices
Above the smooth hollow of air
Which holds the floor of vapour –
Beneath
An ocean waits on the horizon
And sends crashing waves to Zicatela
Place of large thorns
The spume of their crests pouncing on the sand –
The disfigured face of a town still evolving
As if resisting the tide of development
Aching to stay hidden
With half-built homes
And tourist hotels
Staring out at the Pacific –
Pacific
Peaceful
Like a giant whose only threat comes from its enormity
Its indifference –
Peaceful
Safe on the sand
Like la escondida
Who escaped her captors there –
He sits
Beneath the cupped hands
Of a drowning fishermen
An octopus aiding
The tragic swells of the ocean –
He’s safely hidden
The value of obscurity
Cleansing his memory –
He walks back along on the promenade
And sees young lovers
And exiled hippies
And Zapotec
And Mixtec
And Chatino
Cautiously coalescing
Blending in obscurity
Hidden from a turning world
Guarded by the lighthouse
That sends ships away from the shore –
No more coffee to be taken to sea
100 years on
From a small fishing village
The thousands grow
All seeking to hide in its twilight.
Valladolid: Cenote Zaci
Her feet grip the edge of a high promontory
Carved out of rock
She looks over
And the translucent-blue eye looks back at her.
She pauses
Her heart beat in her ears
She jumps
And she floats in air
As if suspended by a millennia of history
Which unravels like spools of tape
Fluttering like bird’s wings
In reverse –
The morning dirt road
Elevated by a bridge
Glimpsing the canopy of jungle
From window to horizon –
Sleepy men on smartphones –
Mayan history told in Spanish
The elongated skulls of demi-gods
The kings who never left their temples –
The palimpsest of time
Lifting each structure
From the previous
To when an asteroid ruptured the earth
And porous rock dissolved in acid rain
Connecting underworlds.
She begins to fall
And the clock spins forward
She meets herself
As her feet hit the water
And she sinks
Into Xibalba.
Her body rises to the surface
Her eyes open
And she is in the Church of San Servicio
With the Virgin of Guadalupe wearing a huipil
Eating ceviche
With shrimp brought from the Caribbean sea
Where flamingoes pound the sand for sea-worms
As the sunlight coruscates the countless ripples of the water.
Oaxaca: Xoloitzcuintli
Just a traveller here
Dragging my feet in haggard boots
Through the streets of Oaxaca de Juarez.
The sierra darkens with the dogs
Howling, snarling and barking
Inaugurating the ceremony of darkness.
The electric lights of street lamps
Kindle the skulled black faces of children
With plastic tubs for treats.
Rapid and febrile music begins to play
A frenzied chorus pierces the night sky
And families gather round graves to raise the dead.
Drunk on the fevered joy
The ghoulish mockery of
Day
Night
Life
Death
The thought curated banks of reason erode in a river of colours
And I swim in a consciousness not my own
Slunk in a street corner sipping on Modelo beer
Forgetting the affronts of a timed world
Where mortality is used to panic minds and scare souls
No –
Mock death
And life
And consort with your deceased
And sway in the abundant joy of brass bands and taco stands
And the oily skeletal swirl of cultures
Colliding
The Zapotec gods
The flowered cemeteries
Gawking strangers
Like me
Howling
Fierce to protect
The macabre masquerade of ecstasy
Where we can disappear into darkness
With everyone.
I wake as if I never went to sleep
The brass bands still playing
The choir of dogs still protecting the streets.
Rosalia and Roberto sit at the breakfast table
Flanked by a sculpture of the last supper and an ofrenda
Listening to mariachi music and watching clouds slip through the mountain pass like ships.
Goodbye friends, thank you
I walk out into Colonia Volcanes
To see a Xoloitzcuintli
Its black eyes looking at me
As if to say
I took you there.
Neil Graham is a songwriter, poet, travel and fiction writer from the UK. His music, going under the moniker Imlac, has gained profound praise; winning multiple awards, performing numerous times on the BBC and being selected to play major UK festivals. Having travelled extensively, he has chosen to relocate to Mexico, having fallen for the country’s beauty.
Andrea Quintero Olivas is a Mexican photographer and visual artist. She has travelled all over the Mexican Republic seeking to capture the essence of her beloved country through her camera lens and artwork.
