Ofelia Zepeda's "Wind"

Probably my favorite readings we covered in this class were the poems from the beginning of the semester. Particularly, I thought “Wind” by Ofelia Zepeda was fascinating. I think that getting insight into the inner thoughts of a Tohono O’odham so early on in the course was helpful to understanding the group as a whole. I really enjoyed the way Zepeda almost personified wind and how she described her father’s deeply personal relationship with it. The lines, “He would sit. / Letting the wind do with him what it will, / hitting him with pieces of sand.” and her description of her father’s willful resignation to the influences of nature and his hopeful certainty that rain would come following the wind were incredibly poetic and really telling of the desert environment that the Tohono O’odham live in; the tribe is dependent on the presence of rain, and Zepeda’s father’s strange satisfaction from being pelted by bits of sand simply because wind was a precursor to rain was such a powerful image to me.