Ramón E. Martínez

Ramón E. Martínez grew up in New Mexico and Arizona. Poems from his full-length collection, The Receipt of Fern Seed have appeared in: A Poetry Mag, American Poetry Review, Balcones, Bilingual Review, Black Warrior Review, Cape Rock, Century, Contact II, Croton Review, Gila Review, Glens Falls Review, Graham House Review, The Greenfield Review, Inlet, Inscape, Panoply, Rio Grande Writer's Newsletter, Riversedge, Víaztlan, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He is currently seeking a publisher for The Receipt of Fern Seed.

Published on 10/1/1999

    Here I am where I said I would be:
    surrounded by ghosts of young war
    veterans. Tattered flags, more desolate
    than flags that survived the worst battles,
    wave goodbye to you.

    Here I am where I said I would be:
    surrounded by ghosts of young war
    veterans. Tattered flags, more desolate
    than flags that survived the worst battles,
    wave goodbye to you.
    I sense your return in the plastic flowers
    pierced into styrofoam crosses,
    in the tin plates on which names are
    no longer legible.
    Dates of birth and death become
    no more than numbers spinning on the mill
    of an angel chime.

    My dreams of you lie
    in the empty flower vases
    that once held real flowers.

    I wait here in the shadow of the Estrellas--
    mountains insisting they are stars.

    Copyright © Ramón E. Martinez, 1999, 2009. All Rights Reserved.