Of the Threads that Connect the Stars

“Of the Threads that Connect the Stars” was written by the American poet Martín Espada. It appeared in the collection Vivas to Those Who Have Failed published by W. W. Norton in 2016.

This is the work of a mature poet, comfortable with his own voice and confident in his place within a long tradition of Whitmanesque artistic advocacy. Both the title of the book and the poem are drawn from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” which in section 24 Whitman writes:

Through me many long dumb voices,

Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,

Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,

And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff

And of the rights of them the others are down upon (Lines 13-18).

“Of the Threads that Connect the Stars” takes the mystical ecstatic of Whitman and places it into the skies of Brooklyn and the lives of Espada’s family.

Espada is a storyteller and a political activist. This narrative poem exemplifies the intersections of personal experience, story, and political engagement as it traces slow progress through three generations.