This is my reading of one of the 13 short stories from my Echoes of the Mind's Eye collection (C) 2021, 2024.

From my Of Pain and Ecstasy: Collected Poems (C) 2011, 2024

This is the final part of my longest free-verse poem. It details the life of my mom who overcame blindness in childhood during the Spanish Civil War and left school at the age of 11 to illegally work on a full-time basis in a cousin's fish cannery to help provide for her eight brothers and sisters after her dad's death after being persecuted by the fascist forces for his anti-fascist non-violent resistance during the war. At 16 she emigrated to join an aunt and uncle in Argentina and worked (by lying about her age) tirelessly to make enough money to reclaim her mom and two youngest brothers in Spain. Hers was a life of incredible hardship and tragedy that would never break her or rob her of her can-do attitude, optimism, humor, and faith in God. She faced and overcame adversity at every turn in times of poverty and plenty through self-reliance, honest hard work, and an unwillingness to view herself as a victim, speaking truth to power long before the phrase became a cliche, and always seizing focusing on the silver lining in every storm cloud. She had the singing voice of an angel and the heart of a lion. As I noted elsewhere, she was always proud of her only son on whom she doted, but " . . . one of her cells was worth ten of me."

The poem was written in the days following her death after a four-year battle with Alzheimer's that robbed her of her eloquence, her prodigious memory, and her quality of life. I miss her every day.

This poem is about my dad who passed away in 2018. It was first published in my Echoes of Dawn at Dusk second book of poems in 2020.

Like his parents before him, he had a hard life from the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War that saw his father self-exiled leaving behind a wife and four very young children to fend for themselves. Through hard work and self-reliance he overcame adversity in three continents during his life, without a single complaint or assistance from anyone other than my mom. He lived under fascist dictators all of his life prior to immigrating to the U.S. in his late thirties with my mom and me. Serious illness, runaway inflation that caused his two businesses to fail, persecution in his native Spain for being the son of a non-fascist-sympathizer, and a roller coaster of success and failure never held him down. He persevered the old fashioned way: by pulling himself up by his bootstraps and working hard even as society crumbled around him. His word was his bond, just like his father and mother before him, and his ethical compass never wavered from true North. The world never needed more men like him more than it does now (and women like my mom cut from similar precious cloth). I will never see or be their equal.

This is the fourth part of my longest free-verse poem. This part deals with a portrait of my paternal grandmother and her struggle to raise four children during and after the Spanish Civil War after her husband fled to Argentina when warned he was about to be arrested by the fascist forces and woud not return for nearly two decades, after Franco pardoned those who supported the losing side but had not fought and spilled blood in the conflict. This poem was first published in my Of Pain and Ecstasy collection of poems.