[ The poet Martín Espada recounts a childhood encounter of death,
mourning the loss of baseball’s Puerto Rican star, Roberto
Clemente.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BIG BIRD DIED FOR YOUR SINS  
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Martín Espada
January 9, 2023
Virginia Quarterly Review
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_ The poet Martín Espada recounts a childhood encounter of death,
mourning the loss of baseball’s Puerto Rican star, Roberto Clemente.
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Big Bird Died for Your Sins

By Martín Espada

Barry was six-foot-six, fifteen like me, floating layups and hook
shots 
over our heads through the hoop in my driveway. We called him Big Bird
for dwarfing us, for his slappy feet, for the mouth that hung in a
grin at all 
our stories. We called him Big Bird because he would
yell _foul_ every time 
anyone bumped him under the basket, as if we lived on Sesame Street.
I liked Big Bird and his white-boy Afro. He never called me a
greasy-haired 
spic under the hoop in my own driveway like Frankie, the clown on
the block.

On New Year’s Eve, Roberto Clemente himself set foot on the prop
plane 
at the airport in Puerto Rico, my father’s island, boxes for
Nicaragua stacked
up after the earthquake, knowing the dictator’s Guardia Nacional
would crack 
open the crates, greedy as a pillaging army, if he did not loom over
them. 
The DC-7, engine like a smoker’s heart, four thousand pounds
overweight, 
sputtered a hundred feet above the trees, then spiraled into the sea
on a night 
when the moon deserted the sky, the keeper of a lighthouse dreaming
drunk. 
A crowd kept vigil on the beach. His compañero the catcher dove and
dove again
between the fins that sliced the waves, till the propeller’s twisted
hand rose 
from the sea, but never the body, never the ballplayer, never
Clemente, never.

My father told me: _Roberto Clemente is dead._ I could swear my
father’s eyes 
were red. I had never seen my father cry. This must be hay fever in
winter.
My mother saw him cry once, watching the funeral of JFK on television,
the black, riderless horse and the empty boots in the stirrups for
the fallen.

Later, the day after the baseball writers voted Clemente into the Hall
of Fame, 
as the boys under the hoop toweled off and scooped up Cokes from a
cooler,
I said: _When my father told me Clemente died, there were tears in
his eyes._ 
No one said anything, not even Frankie the clown. Big Bird stopped
grinning. 
Big Bird was thinking. The whine in his voice was gone when he finally
said:
_They only did that cuz he was Puerto Rican. They only did that cuz he
was Black._

There was once an episode on _Sesame Street_ where Luis and María
taught 
Big Bird about the meaning of death, how we all die one day, and his
yellow 
head drooped heavy as a sunflower. _I feel sad_, he said. I could
have rolled 
the numbers out like the dice in my Strat-O-Matic baseball board game:
.317 lifetime average, .414 in the 1971 Series, 3,000 hits, twelve
Gold Gloves, 
the only walk-off inside-the-park grand slam in baseball history. I
could have
called on the spirit of a dead ballplayer to flood the screens in
their heads
with the leap and stab of the ball against the wall in right field
that saved 
a no-hitter, the bark of the ball off his bat that fractured a
pitcher’s leg. 
I said nothing. I never said anything, even when Frankie would croon
his
favorite song in my face: _spicka-spooka._ The other boys would
bathe in it.

The next game began. I guarded Big Bird. I stomped on his slappy feet,
spiked
my elbows into his rib cage, rammed shoulder after shoulder into his
back,
blocked shots by jamming the ball into his chest. I knew nothing of
karate, 
but kicked the air every time I yanked a rebound away. _Foul_, yelled
Big Bird,
like a song on the jukebox nobody wanted to hear. _Foul_. This was my
hoop, 
so I couldn’t foul out. I wanted to see Big Bird cry like I saw my
father cry.
Big Bird sniffed; no one saw him sneeze. He squinted hard, but we
all knew.

That day, Big Bird died for the sins of the fathers who cursed at the
dark
ballplayers on TV in the living room, where their sons could hear it
all.
I had a vision of Big Bird rising above the palm trees, igniting in
the air 
like a feathery piñata too close to the spark of a cigarette,
crashing into
the sea, the sharks feasting on yellow feathers, Luis and María
on _Sesame _
_Street_ explaining the meaning of a puppet’s death as the
nation mourned. 

 Martín Espada’s latest book of poems is _Floaters_ (Norton,
2021), winner of the National Book Award and a finalist for the Los
Angeles Times Book Prize. Other collections of poems include _Vivas
to Those Who Have Failed_ (Norton, 2016), _The Trouble
Ball_ (Norton, 2011), and _Alabanza_ (Norton, 2003). He has
received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, a
Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at
the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

* Poetry baseball
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* Roberto Clemente
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