With a Star in My Hand Read online

  like family.

  When I win a verse competition,

  I’m surprised, but all the other guests

  say they expected it.

  Triumph is a feeling like flight,

  a hopeful unfolding of feathers,

  and then the sheer delight

  of feeling accepted.

  REJECTION

  Back in Valparaíso, I find work

  at the customs office, keeping track

  of goods that arrive and depart on ships.

  Boxes.

  Bundles.

  Sacks of grain.

  Did I really win

  a poetry competition?

  Boring work leaves my mind free

  to dream up articles that might be of interest

  to newspapers.

  When I write about sports, I’m told

  that I express myself too clearly.

  It’s not what we need, the editor informs me.

  Those are the words every writer dreads,

  but discouragement is never an option,

  we all have to keep scribbling, or our voices

  will vanish.

  PERSEVERANCE

  All my thoughts are a mixture

  of swift disappointments

  and endless efforts.

  I stay away from work

  more often than I go in.

  Excuses make me feel ashamed,

  but I pretend to be sick, just so I can be free

  to stroll along the shoreline, boarding small boats

  to go exploring.

  The sea

  is beautiful,

  and my dreams

  are invisible,

  but my pen

  is strong

  and persistent.

  I never give up

  the flow of poems

  aimed at waves

  and wind.

  Mind storms.

  Verse hurricanes.

  Stories about gnomes, nymphs,

  and palaces of sunlight,

  the tale of a man who keeps

  a bluebird trapped within the cage

  of his mind, even though the poor creature

  yearns to be free, soaring alone in endless sky.

  I write about verses brought to earth

  by dark garzas, the graceful herons

  that fly above me each time I go out

  exploring.

  I write about Chile’s changing seasons,

  and Nicaragua’s tropical blossoms,

  about every aspect of nature

  and human nature,

  then I add a fantasy

  about the queen of fairies,

  who travels in a pearl

  pulled by golden beetles.

  In this story of long ago,

  there was a time when everyone

  received a magical gift, either riches, strength,

  eagle wings, harmony, rhythm, a rainbow,

  sunlight, the melodies of stars,

  or the music of jungles . . .

  but humans envied each other’s gifts,

  bickering and battling, so that now

  all of us are always granted the same wish,

  receiving only a peaceful blue veil of dreams

  for the future—in other words, nothing

  but hope.

  DANGER

  Sometimes on quiet evenings

  I visit hillside villages.

  The music of poor men comforts me.

  Days spent tunneling underground

  must be so dark and harsh, but outdoors

  at night, miners fill the village air

  with songs of light . . .

  until guitar players and singers

  are surrounded

  by drinkers,

  and fights break out,

  guns are drawn,

  shots fired,

  people injured.

  When I accompany a doctor

  to the bedside of a wounded man,

  it feels oddly familiar

  to once again be

  a witness,

  an outside observer

  possessing no weapons

  just verses

  mere words.

  This could have been me, lying bleeding

  and helpless, back when I was younger

  and more reckless, drinking, fighting,

  and rebelling against the whole world

  instead of just speaking out against

  injustice.

  At dawn, I leave the hills,

  my heart filled with wonder

  at the way human voices

  persist in singing to blue sky,

  no matter how crushing

  the poverty, no matter

  how dark

  the tunnels

  where miners

  are forced to labor,

  their suffering constantly

  interrupted by daydreams.

  NO LONGER A TEENAGER

  I’m hired by La Nación, the same famous

  Argentine newspaper that publishes my hero,

  José Martí, the Cuban poet I think of as a mentor

  even though I’ve never met him.

  My editor wants one new poem each day.

  It seems impossible, but I’m sure I can do it,

  if I keep reading the verses of others, to find

  inspiration.

  Martí praises freedom, equality, and hope.

  I treasure the same themes, but everyone says

  that my style is completely new, musical rhythms

  filled with colors that resemble paintings

  by impressionists, the sentences in prose poems

  made short, simple, and visual

  by my love of art

  and love of love.

  MY FIRST BOOK

  Azul.

  Blue.

  The calm title shows

  how my hurricane of verses

  helps me find

  a sea

  of peace.

  A LIFETIME OF REBELLIOUS RHYTHMS AND RHYMES

  Travels to many lands,

  marriage, babies, revolutions,

  sorrows and joys, a meeting

  with Martí in New York,

  the inspiration to write

  every day. . . .

  In one verse, I warn Theodore Roosevelt,

  powerful president of the United States,

  that his aggressive nation’s violent invasions

  of Latin America

  will be met with furious

  resistance.

  It’s not difficult to predict wars

  that are still far off in the distant future.

  All the signs are present now—the US plans

  to dominate our whole Spanish-speaking world.

  They won’t succeed, because we will refuse

  to be ruled by arrogant racial hatred.

  In Mexico, I offend the dictator Porfirio Díaz,

  and in Cuba, I read my verses out loud

  to crowds of humble farmers,

  surrounded by their listening wives

  and spellbound children.

  After all my complex poems written for grown-ups,

  I end up feeling surprised that my most prized

  and beloved words

  are those of a fairy tale

  I scribbled on the fan

  of a young girl

  named Margarita.

  The first stanza is about

  the beautiful sea

  and scented wind,

  pleasing images which lead

  to a story of rebellious

  independence.

  Princess Margarita defies her father

  by flying up into the sky

  to fetch a brilliant star.

  When the angry king warns

  that heaven will punish her,

  God himself speaks, revealing

  that He’s pleased, admiring

  her courage and perseverance

/>   so sincerely

  that He allows her

  to carry the glittering treasure

  back to Earth, where she wears

  the star of light

  as a jewel, fastened

  to her silk clothing

  right beside the rest

  of her natural collection

  of wonders—a feather,

  a flower, a poem,

  and a pearl.

  MY MESSAGE FOR THE FUTURE

  At first, I’m astonished by the popularity

  of my most famous verse, but now I realize

  that nothing means more to children

  than hope—simply knowing they can grow up

  and think for themselves, following the glow

  of constellations

  as they travel

  beyond expectations,

  to find peace

  in a storm of dreams,

  by reaching up to claim

  the gleaming light

  of their own star-bright

  imaginations.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I wrote this book because my Cuban ancestors were some of the humble farmers who attended poetry readings when Darío traveled to the island. Little did he know how inspiring his poetry would be for my great-grandmother and all her descendants. At family gatherings, Darío’s verses were recited, just as I described in The Wild Book, a verse novel about my grandmother’s childhood. In fact, the Nicaraguan poet was so revered in our family that two of my great-uncles were named Rubén and Darío in his honor, and I am not the first Margarita.

  With a Star in My Hand is historical fiction based on the autobiography of Rubén Darío (1867–1916). All the events and situations are factual, and because Darío wrote so clearly about his childhood and youth, most of the emotional aspects are also taken from documented sources. Only a few small details have been imagined.

  Darío is known as the Father of modernismo, a literary movement that blended poetry and prose, complex rhymes, assonance (vowel rhymes), and free verse, as well as classical European and indigenous Native American images. The 1888 publication of Azul in Valparaíso—when Darío was only twenty-one—is widely regarded as a revolutionary turning point in world literature. Until that time, romantic poetry tended to be overly sentimental, dwelling on one’s own emotions instead of observing the entire world, with its interwoven array of troubles and beauty.

  Darío’s importance continued to grow throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and continues long after his death. His birthplace, the town of Metapa, is now called Ciudad Darío. The National Library of Nicaragua was renamed in his honor. His childhood home in León is a museum visited by poets from all over the world.

  As the early twentieth-century mentor of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Darío influenced Spain’s Generation of 1927, a group of poets who spoke out against the fascist dictatorship of Franco. They included Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, and Rafael Alberti, who in turn influenced Mexico’s Octavio Paz, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, Cuba’s Alejo Carpentier, Chile’s Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, and Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez. Unifying themes for all these writers are freedom, imagination, and the dream of social justice. It is a literary tradition that still thrives today, in the work of nearly every modern Latin American and US Latino poet and novelist.

  Pablo Neruda described Darío as a sonorous elephant who shattered all the crystals of an era to let in fresh air. Pedro Salinas wrote that Darío was always half in this world and half out of it, a dreamy tendency which can be found in the work of all “magic realists,” modern Latin America’s answer to fantasy. Described in Spanish as lo real maravilloso (marvelous reality), magic realism shows ordinary lives touched by specific natural and supernatural marvels, rather than imagining completely separate alternate worlds.

  After the publication of Azul in Chile, Darío returned to Nicaragua. He was received as a hero in León, but soon moved to El Salvador, where he became the director of a newspaper that promoted the unification of Central America as one country. Soon after he got married, he was forced to flee to Guatemala due to a military coup that overthrew the government of El Salvador. Over the next few decades, he lived in many countries, wrote for newspapers, published several poetry books, served as Nicaragua’s ambassador to various countries, and was often impoverished.

  Despite a stormy personal life and sophisticated literary body of work, Rubén Darío is most often remembered by the general public for his rhymed fairy tale, “A Margarita Debayle.” He composed this long poem spontaneously, when the five-year-old daughter of a friend asked him to tell her a story.

  “A Margarita Debayle” is so beloved in every Spanish-speaking country that it has been recited by parents and grandparents to the spellbound children of many generations. The story of a princess who flies to the sky to claim a star for herself was far ahead of its time, showing girls that they could be independent. “A Margarita Debayle” begins with an introduction that many Latino children know by heart:

  Margarita, está linda la mar,

  y el viento

  lleva esencia sutil de azahar;

  yo siento

  en el alma una alondra cantar:

  tu acento.

  Margarita, te voy a cantar

  un cuento.

  Without attempting to reproduce the beautiful rhyme, assonance, and meter, the above stanza can be loosely translated as:

  Margarita, the sea is beautiful,

  and the wind

  carries a subtle scent of orange blossoms;

  I feel

  a skylark singing in my soul:

  your voice.

  Margarita, I am going to tell you

  a story.

  To read the entire long poem in rhymed English, see Rosalma Zubizarreta’s expert translation at the end of Dancing Home by Alma Flor Ada and Gabriel M. Zubizarreta (Atheneum, 2011).

  More from the Author

  Soaring Earth

  Jazz Owls

  Enchanted Air

  Forest World

  Lion Island

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MARGARITA ENGLE was the 2017–2019 Young People’s Poet Laureate, and received the 2019 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature. She is a Cuban American author of many verse novels, including The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor book, and The Lightning Dreamer, a PEN Literary Award for Young Adult Literature winner. Her verse memoir Enchanted Air received the Pura Belpré Author Award and was a Walter Honor Book, Younger Readers Category, and a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults, among other accolaades. Her picture book Drum Dream Girl received the Charlotte Zolotow Award. Visit her at margaritaengle.com.

  Visit us at simonandschuster.com/teen

  www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Margarita-Engle

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  ALSO BY MARGARITA ENGLE

  Enchanted Air:

  Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir

  Soaring Earth:

  A Companion Memoir to Enchanted Air

  Jazz Owls:

  A Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots

  Forest World

  Lion Island:

  Cuba’s Warrior of Words

  Silver People:

  Voices from the Panama Canal

  The Lightning Dreamer:

  Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist

  The Wild Book

  Hurricane Dancers:

  The First Caribbean Pirate Shipwreck

  The Firefly Letters:

  A Suffragette’s Journey to Cuba

  Tropical Secrets:

  Holocaust Refugees in Cuba

  The Surrender Tree:

  Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom

  The Poet Slave of Cuba:

  A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano

  REFERENCES

  Darío, Rubén. Autobiografía de Rubé
n Darío. Barcelona: Red Ediciones, 2015.

  Darío, Rubén. Azul. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena, 1947.

  Darío, Rubén. Prosas profanas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena, 1947.

  Darío, Rubén. Songs of Life and Hope/Cantos de vida y esperanza.

  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

  Jiménez, Juan Ramón. Mi Rubén Darío. Madrid: Visor Libros, 2012.

  Lázaro, Georgina. Ilustrado por Lonnie Ruiz. Rubén Darío. Lyndhurst, NJ: Lectorum, 2017.

  Morrow, John A. Amerindian Elements in the Poetry of Rubén Darío. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008.

  Watland, Charles D. Poet Errant, A Biography of Rubén Darío. New York: Philosophical Library, 1965.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Margarita Engle

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2020 by Willian Santiago

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