At Twilight on the Road to Sogamoso, by Maurice Kilwein Guevara

Today, a poem by Maurice Kilwein Guevara.

At Twilight on the Road to Sogamoso

by Maurice Kilwein Guevara

The sun is beginning to go down

over a field of yellow onions. The edges

of the clouds are almost pink, and at this hour

the maguey rises up like a flower of dark blades.

I worked so long today I have forgotten

my own hunger. It takes a full minute

for me to remember a word I have used

all my life. What the Mexicans call poncho.

At twilight I see it, abandoned, hanging like a ghost

on the limb of a tree: my own brown ruana

next to gray speckled chickens pecking at roots

and a black track of storm coming west over the green mountain.

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About the poet:   Poet, playwright, and actor Maurice Kilwein Guevara was born in Belencito, Colombia in 1961, and raised in Pittsburgh. He earned a BA in English and a BS in psychology from the University of Pittsburgh, an MFA from Bowling Green State University, and a PhD in English and comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin. Lilwein Guevara’s poems often use overlapping voices and languages to explore the tensions and simultaneities that complicate the lives of immigrants in mid-America. Kilwein Guevara has published several collections of poetry, including POEMA (2009); Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose (2001), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize; and Postmortem (1994), nominated for the National Book Award. Kilwein Guevara co-wrote, with John Trevellini and Mike Sell, and acted in the film To Box Clouds (2002). His play, The Last Bridge/El Ultimo Puente (1999), received a staged reading Off-Broadway.  Kilwein Guevara’s honors include a Fulbright Scholarship in Colombia and awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. He is a founding member of the National Latino Writers’ Association and has taught at the University of Wisconsin and at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.