El Burro by Shea Socrates
Poetry editor Tuuli Qin-Terrill on today’s poem: Balancing the informative, humorous, and contemplative, “El Burro” is delightfully instructive. The inquisitive student in us all is tickled by Shea Socrates’ playful address and we are motivated to learn by means of absurdity. We are enchanted by the sound of language, the sound of laughter, before realizing that it is the act of making connections—between words, between ideas, and between the people who surround us—that is the integral element of learning. This poem asks us “how much we can fit into a small space” before we are compelled into uncontrollable motion towards understanding and towards each other.
el burro
I tell my students
that in Spanish, adding -ito makes
something small,
like pájaro,
a bird,
becoming pajarito,
a little bird.
“So then,” I say,
“what about burro,
the donkey,
becoming burrito?”
They laugh.
They imagine a donkey
folded up in foil,
with cheese and rice and onions.
I laugh back and ask:
what do you know
about beasts of burden
and how much
we can fit
into a small space
before it’s ready to burst?
They laugh again,
and I am thinking
of “El Burro” by Rubén Fuentes,
how the violins
hee-haw before giving
way to the gallop of a son
rhythm, the way the donkey
in the song transforms, just at the end,
into something faster, moving beyond
the weight it once carried.
Shea Socrates (they/them) is a teacher and emerging writer. They live in Detroit with their partner Felicia and three pets, Vashti, Coney, and Vern.
