If Today Were Tomorrow

(Paperback)

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My language was born among trees, / it holds the taste of earth; / my ancestors tongue is my home. So writes Humberto Akabal, a Kiche Maya poet born in Momostenango, in the western highlands of Guatemala. A legacy of land and language courses through the pages of this spirited collection, offering an expansive take on this internationally renowned poets work.

Written originally in the Indigenous Kiche language and translated from the Spanish by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, these poems blossom from the landscape that raised Akabalmountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. His unpretentious verse models a contraconquistacounter-conquestperspective, one that resists the impulse to impose meaning on the world and encourages us to receive it instead. In church, he writes, the only prayer you hear / comes from the trees / they turned into pews. Every living thing has its song, these poems suggest. We need only listen for it.

Attuned, uncompromising, Akabal teaches readers to recognize grace in every earthly observationin the wind, carrying a forgotten name. In the roots, whose floral messengers tell us / what earth is like / on the inside. Even in the birds, who sing in mid-flight / and shit while flying. At turns playful and pointed, this prescient entry in the Seedbank series is a transcendent celebration of both Kiche indigeneity and Akabals lifetime of work.