The Unicorn Poem and Flowers and Songs of Sorrow

E. A. Mares

Poet, historian, and college professor E. A. Mares was one of the leading lights of the Chicano renaissance.  His Unicorn Poem, first published in 1980, has been hailed as a Chicano epic. The present volume includes thirty later poems under the subtitle “Flowers and Songs of Sorrow,” a meditation on the inevitable reversal of triumphs of conquest.  

“Mares proposes not a myth of bloodletting, but one of survival in love and goodness.  His is an image of the unity of all peoples who would side with nature against the spoilers of the earth.  To avoid fixation on the enemy, he prefers to concentrate on his own people, but always through the lens of the writer whose real material is language.”—Bruce Novoa

Winter Rio Grande, a slow trickle now,
Carries the melted snow down from the north.
Stands of cottonwood and scrub grass
Turn the bosque a wild ashen color.
The river is grey, springtime distant,
The bosque a tangle of vines sculpted by freezing wind.

I walk the east bank upstream toward Alameda.
Suddenly a coyote lopes ahead, stops and stares at me,
Then moves off into the camouflage undergrowth.
I cut away from him at a sharp angle
To the southward flow of water.

I think we carry pictures of each other
Inside our heads.  We met once before
Beneath Sangre de Cristo peaks to the north.
Then our world was all fur and fang.
Now we part and go our separate ways.
Along the Rio Grande, the Great River
Forming the dorsal column of our millennial voyage.
We will meet again. . . .
            —“Bosque, North Valley, Albuquerque”

5½ x 8½ inches • 80 pages • ISBN 0-931122-65-1 • $8.95