I don’t have roots

I was dug from the earth (molded from many clays)

Born into lost words and

Freefalling freedom

I am one of those Americans bound to land

And nowhere to place this conviction

Schools raised me to claim

My inheritance.

Whitman claimed I contained

These lands in my body,

In my expression, boundless.

Yet I, too, am colonized [contained] (contaminated?)

I am colony, colonizer, and colonized

I am Puerto Rican by reclamation

By family, by blood

Told our lands were never ours

Shown that power wrested

Is not soon reclaimed.

Thousands of miles away,

I’ve sped to the coast

Sunset chasing, not knowing

What burned me to find

Dying bursts of the sun.

My eyes searched and scanned

The buried horizon,

The swaths of waves

Unclaimed