What Rough Beast | Poem for May 10, 2017

What if King Ferdinand, still smug over conquering Granada, unfurled a large banner over Castille plaza? And within el rey’s first hundred days of office, incited raids for the Inquisition. “To take our country back” from those illegal moriscos, who in their stubborn accents, swore to be baptized. But as the bishop dunks their heads in ablution ponds, the takbirs of their mothers betrayed them. What if the Spanish conquest was on the ten o’clock news? Would pundits criticize their fellow white men from the Iberian peninsula as “bunch of rapists too?” Would these war criminals be granted a comprehensive path to citizenship? Would the Spanish courts dig into Cortés’s letter correspondences, charged with fraud for anonymous donations from royal puppets? Or would he be charged with licentiousness for grabbing dark-skinned princesses from Méxica? How he stole priest edicts and shaman mints—one to freshen his mind, the other his breath. Broke as un chiste, would Cortés wait for the crown’s remesas, spend his days languishing at the inner cities of Tenochtitlán? Maybe pick up Náhuatl in his ex-pat exile? Or would he wait for citizenship. Like the rest of us. Months turn to years, to decades, to centuries. Until finally, he is an old man, waiting before aduanas with their cardboard boxes of tamales; the countless envoys relatives encargan. The biblia, that same one he remembers pillaging through towns with, is now earmarked with our favorite passages. To get us through the day. Y ahora el ex-mercenary, haggard and slow, spends his days protesting the State, regretting the way he made whites drunk with the promise that they’re God’s chosen men. He now plays dice with curanderos in Nogales, gambling who can leave the world first.

The banner is in pig’s blood. It reads, “Make Spain great again.”