If Today Were Tomorrow

Book excerpt: A masterful collection of poems rooted in K’iche’ Maya culture illustrating all the ways meaning manifests within our world, and how best to behold it. “My language was born among trees, / it holds the taste of earth; / my ancestors’ tongue is my home.” So writes Humberto Ak’abal, a K’iche’ 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 poet’s work. Written originally in the Indigenous K’iche’ language and translated from the Spanish by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, these poems blossom from the landscape that raised Ak’abal—mountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. His unpretentious verse models a contraconquista—counter-conquest—perspective, 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, Ak’abal teaches readers to recognize grace in every earthly observation—in 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 K’iche’ indigeneity and Ak’abal’s lifetime of work.