Rooftop Poetry Club - Maura Zubieta

Maura Zubieta

Bio:
Born in the Heart of South America, Bolivia, Maura Zubieta is proud of her Latin roots and culture and is excited about becoming an English Language Arts teacher, a published writer, a performing artist and getting married August 2008, to her teammate and biggest fan, Brian Manka. She was awarded the silver medal from the Creative Writing Department of John Bowne High School, was one of the winners of the Barnard essay contest, "A Woman I Admire", and has since, written and performed her poetry both in Binghamton University and Buffalo State College, where she is currently finishing her education.

Poems:

The Snow Cream Mountain

Among nine brothers and sisters,
You mother, were the most hardworking and true.
An innocent girl of chubby apple cheeks, who sang songs from Abba in her childhood days
You always made your parents proud with your excellent grades,
and lady manners.

An innocent girl,
An ignorant girl,
Sex was not part of your world.
It was never your fear. But marriage was, and so you ran away from it as soon as it fell off the lips of
A man, any man.

I wish to go back into the past and help you mother. I wish I could have told you that kissing your
First boyfriend would not get you pregnant, but letting him inside you would.
Wish I could have told you daddy would be kissing another woman when you were three months
Pregnant with me, that you would see him and never trust him again.

With a strict, religious Catholic man as a father,
Who hit your brothers and sister, if any ever dared to pick up a pencil from the floor that was not theirs,
Is it your fault then that you didn't defend yourself when your husband hit you?
You could have never imagined that the hand of love could be so cruel.
That it would leave you mourning yellow bruises and make you bleed your heart out.

Mother, you're a snow cream mountain,
No matter what the seasons life has brought down on you,
You have stayed and grown into your compassionate nature.

Even when we were immigrants, nobodies struggling to survive in a hostile world,
You worked at the sewing machine for long hours in the night and gave your money away
To brothers and sisters, so that they too would come to America to be somebody.

Now a nurse, admired by those who know you and loved by your patients,
I wish I knew how you do it, how you handle
Taking care of elderly people every day, to witness later, as some of those same people,
Who once smiled at you, curl up in their chairs like little children and die.

The most beautiful woman I've ever known,
Even with the wrinkles in the corners of your eyes, which show that time is catching up,
Your arms, mother, are the peaks of the mountain that reach up to the sky
Praising God for everything you have,
And the crust is your heart, strong even with the movement of wind and time.

You have taught me to be a fighter, to punch back and punch hard,
Both with my fists and my words
To love myself first and never hold hatred or bitterness inside,
Against anything or anyone,

Both father and mother,
The woman who never smiled on her wedding,
You remain in me,
The snow cream mountain

Have sunlight warming my skin

Now I belong to the rocks and the green,
On the banks of a river, clear as the glass of my bowl
Her mother's "Jesus" and then I was falling again,
The scream of a little girl staring at me near the door
Landing wet on the wooden floor
Air slapping my whole body
Up and out
And I jumped,
Until madness took its place
Blue breath bubbling in my face
A broken fan that circled without end

Kcab dna htrof

Swimming back and forth,
A pale, wide brown-eyed fish
I lived in a bowl all my life.

Unto the Woman God Said:

Conquer the spade of steel, and with love erode rocks to men's hearts
At the touch of your hands, the whisper of your voice?
Rise like the Andes Mountains, above clouds of silence
All the yellow climbing roses are not as beautiful as you are to me,
In you I live, a burning rainbow flame that circles
like a never ending stream,
The veins in your body I dreamed, and

I am woman.