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Author:	Jacklyn W. Potter
Title:	Las Lechuzas
Publication info:	Ann Arbor, MI: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library 1997-1998
Rights/Permissions:	This work is protected by copyright and may be linked to without seeking permission. Permission must be received for subsequent distribution in print or electronically. Please contact [email protected] for more information.
Source:	Las Lechuzas Jacklyn W. Potter vol. 12, 1997-1998 Issue title: Unequal Exchange: Gender and Economies of Power
Subject terms:	Poetry
URL:	http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.ark5583.0012.007

Las Lechuzas

Jacklyn W. Potter

Las lechuzas are like eagles and owls. At night women we know become lechuzas. We can stop the curse only if we say: "Sal y pimienta, pimienta y sal." We say it and la lechuza falls from the sky. Then she cannot curse us or harm us.

—Migrant farmworkers, Eastern Shore of Virginia

Your hands move    among the brightnesses
of growing tomatoes, peppers, 
babies from your own 
ripeness.

You bend    and sweat    and scratch
the yellow dust    that makes 
a folding    and unfolding map
of your forehead.

I travel the paths    I see there 
along the tiny arteries    that end 
as sharply as your fingers snap
the fruit    leaving blunt stems 
pointing at sky dusk.

I bring no song.
Women, you have your own.
You sing it    in the bare light
of a migrant camp lights bulb.  You sing it
in narrow compartments    behind screen 
doors that frame an ancient shaft of light
your husbands and sons follow
to work at the ketchup factory.

Rise your moon
Rise las lechuzas
above fields    above the night rows
where green is black
where women speak wings 
where women look down
on smaller moons    that hang 
beneath black leaves.

Lechuzas above me    delicious fear
¡Sal y pimienta    pimienta y sal!
A sovereign belief spells my hunger 
as I move    down Safeway rows
choosing.

la lechuza [Spanish]: owl; farmworkers apply word to a spiritually and physically beautiful woman, who can fly and curse weaker beings below—she loses her powers only by the ritual of spoken language chanted by those weaker beings on earth.

Reprinted with author's permission: Jacklyn Potter. "Las Lechuzas." Ed. Sandra Haldeman Martz. If I Had a Hammer: Women's Work in Fiction, Poetry, and Photographs. Watsonville, CA: Papier-Mache, 1990. 198-199.

Jacklyn W. Potter has published poems in journals and anthologies including Plainsong, Poet Lore, The Mac Guffin, and Hungry as We Are: Washington Area Poets. During the late 1970s, Ms. Potter organized farmworkers on Virginia's Eastern Shore. She wrote this poem after spending an evening with farmworker women at their camp.