Desert Mockingbird

Even on Sunday,
you advertise your disrespect.

In this age of diplomacy,
you're a true smart mouth

belting out crazy combinations
with no careful qualifiers,

sass without a future,
brash, tactless, no bureaucrat.

Indifferent to all frowns,
you play sounds,

and when you stop
only cicadas throb, doves coo.

All year I wait for you,
a tease I can't resist.

tempting me to throw my head back
and just let the sounds slide up
                                                and out

©Pat Mora

About the Book

Drawing on oral and lyrical traditions, this book honors the grace and spirit of mothers, daughters, lovers, and goddesses. From a tribute to Frida Kahlo to advice from an Aztec goddess, the poems explore the intimate and sacred spaces of borderlands through many voices: a revolutionary, a domestic worker, a widow.

Highlighted Reviews

"So much has Pat Mora made the Texas landscape hers, I cannot enter it without recalling her poetry. Not a rose, no. But a cactus, hoarding the precious agua santa, surviving."—Sandara Cisneros

"Pat Mora's sensous lyricism makes a special contribution to the strong and varied literature emerging from the Mexican-American culture in recent years. She is of those tejana poets I admire."—Denise Levetrov

"Ms. Mora's poems are proudly bilingual, an eloquent answer to purists who refuse to see language as something that lives and changes."
—William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review

Additional Reviews

"Pat Mora evokes Mexican American experience, mythology and history through lyrics, meditations and chants that combine to cast a hypnotic and haunting spell . . . .The voice in Agua Santa is what beguiles and enchants as it explores the personal and spiritual dimensions of the borderlands."—Alison Townsend, Women's Review of Books

"All five senses are put to work here, as Pat Mora leads us briskly through a garden of earthly delights."—Peter Thorpe, Rocky Mountain News