Banyan

Banyan is a sequence of poems about a father-son relationship that deals not only with fatherhood and childhood, but also with exile, memory, and assimilation. Using the metaphor of the tree of its title, whose tendril-like roots grow out from the thick branches of the tree and downward where they burrow deep and over years become themselves stabilizing trunks, Banyan examines a son's relationship to his father, his native Cuba, and his adopted home in the US - the son always represented by the burrowing roots, and the father and homelands all represented by the sturdy grown trunks. Simply, put, Banyan is a testament to the nature of immigration and the search of an individual's sense of place and family.