Jimmy Santiago Baca - Green Chile lyrics

I prefer red chile over my eggs and potatoes for breakfast. Red chile ristras decorate my door, dry on my roof, and hang from eaves. They lend open-air vegetable stands historical grandeur, and gently swing with an air of festive welcome. I can hear them talking in the wind, haggard, yellowing, crisp, rasping tongues of old men, licking the breeze. But grandmother loves green chile. When I visit her, she holds the green chile pepper in her wrinkled hands. Ah, voluptuous, masculine, an air of authority and youth simmers from its swan-neck stem, tapering to a flowery collar, fermenting resinous spice. A well-dressed gentleman at the door my grandmother takes sensuously in her hand, rubbing its firm glossed sides, caressing the oily rubbery serpent, with mouth -watering fulfillment, fondling its curves with gentle fingers. Its bearing magnificent and taut as flanks of a tiger in mid-leap, she thrusts her blade into and cuts it open, with lust on her hot mouth, sweating over the stove, bandanna round her forehead, mysterious pa**ion on her face as she serves me green chile con carne between soft warm leaves of corn tortillas, with beans and rice–her sacrifice to here little prince. I slurp form my plate with last bit of tortilla, my mouth burns and I hiss and drink a tall gla** of cold water. All over New Mexico, sunburned men and women drive rickety trucks stuffed with gunny sacks of green chile, from Belen, Beguita, Wllard, Estancia, San Antonio y Socorro, from fields to roadside stands, you see them roasting green chile in screen-sided homemade barrels, and for a dollar a bag, we relive this old, beautiful ritual again and again.