A father bequeaths hope for a son’s better future

“Breaking Bread with the Darkness — The Esai Poems, Vol. 1” by Jimmy Santiago Baca Sherman Asher Publishing, $12.95, 111 pp.

Father’s Day is June 19, and although books perennially rank below sports tickets, restaurant dinners and electronics as the most popular presents for pops, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s new poetry collection is especially appropriate for any dad.

It’s “a primer for paternity,” writes Carolyn Forche in her introduction, but it also is a father’s treasure for the man his son will be.

Baca himself had neither a father nor a model for one. Abandoned by his Indio-Hispanic parents at age 2, he was taken in by his grandmother, then stuck into an orphanage several years later.

A runaway at 13, Baca lived on the street or ricocheted through “the system,” from juvenile homes to detention centers to the county jail until a drug conviction at 21 sent him up for five years in a maximum-security prison.

During hard time in solitary, Baca taught himself to read and write and discovered a life-changing, voracious passion for poetry. Since then, his dozen-plus books of poetry, fiction and essays have won international accolades while Baca has inspired and mentored kids who, like him, grew up bound in struggles with poverty, discrimination, neglect, addiction and ignorance.

“The Esai Poems” the title of the first of a quartet of paeans that Baca is writing to his five children.

“The Esai Poems” were composed for one of the youngest, his son, now 7. The book’s publication comes at a momentous tipping point in Baca’s life. As he writes in the preface: “This September 2010 marks the time I have been more free than imprisoned; 25 years in the system, 25 years and one month out in freedom.”

What makes Baca’s life particularly sweet from this vantage is Esai’s very presence in it. The name Esai means “the light that shines equally on all things” and the everyday joy and miracles of his young son’s life warm and illuminate Baca’s own:

“He wakes from his afternoon siesta,/flapping legs and hands,/a bluebird perched on the birch branch of mother’s arm/ready to raid/cornfields/in his father’s heart.”

Baca’s familiar voice of anger is still raised here against violence, war, greed, dishonesty and manipulation. Now, however, he is often more meditative. How will his son confront the evils of a society he’ll inevitably inherit?

“What will he feel when he realizes that for some people/war is a wonderful investment/to make money,/that the value of human life/is measured by the market price-$37.50-/of a barrel of oil.”

Or, watching Esai sleeping peacefully, Baca worries that all his son will have learned about loving others could someday, somehow “turn sour and bitter in him” and wonders “will he become a victim of thugs and criminals/ wearing suits and driving new cars?”

Love and a father’s hard-won wisdom are the greatest gifts he can give to his child. Baca’s love of life is what he gives to Esai, who in turn shares with him — and us — his “joyous exuberance of being alive.”

Robert Woltman is an Albuquerque poet and writer.

Jimmy Santiago Baca reads, discusses, signs “The Esai Poems” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 19, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW; at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 23, at the Taos Convention Center, 120 Civic Plaza Drive, Taos; and at 7 p.m. April 26 at Sininger Hall, New Mexico Highlands University, Las Vegas, N.M.