The River Pierce Foundation hosted “Poetry Under the Sundial,” a Spring poetry festival, on Sunday, March 17, at the Treviño-Uribe Rancho fort in San Ygnacio.
The afternoon event in the courtyard of the historic fort provided an environmentally pleasing setting to herald the advent of Spring.
Members of Laredo Border Slam, including Armando X. López, Amanda Castañeda, Will Shrout, Isabel Ramirez Shrout, Joe Molina, and Sam Bratton read at the event.
Vivid and memorable was the poem of Bratton, who goes by “Nobody” and who recited with wry humor and heartbreak a poem about love lost.
Guest readers included Rosa María De Llano, Dr. María Alma Gonzalez Pérez, Diana Uribe, María Eugenia Guerra, Lola Quesada, and Ricky Johnson.
The sundial referenced in the program for the poetry reading was built by
José Villarreal who as a youngster was captured near Revilla (Guerrero Viejo, Tamps.) by raiding Comanches along with his friend, Cosme Martinez. After escaping, they found their way home by following the North Star. In 1851, Villarreal, then a blacksmith, built a simple iron sundial on a piece of sandstone that was placed over the arched stones of the southern doorway to the fort. The device, which keeps Mexico City time, was Villarreal’s tribute to the North Star that had guided him and his companion home safely.
From the River Pierce Foundation program for the poetry reading: The word “zaguán” derives from the Arabic ustuwān (porch, vestibule), used to denote an entrance leading to a central courtyard. Ours features a sundial made from a plinth of sandstone, set at 28 degrees to mark the latitude of our location, with a gnomon made of iron in the form of an arrow. The dial has two faces to mark the passing of the equinoxes. In the year 325 CE, nearly one thousand seven hundred years ago, the Council of Nicea established that Easter would be held on the first Sunday after the first full moon occurring on or after the vernal equinox. This was a very important detail to know if you were living in a settlement like San Ygnacio, far from ecclesiastical leadership. Because the sundial is oriented to the North Star by way of a tiny hole drilled into an upper corner, it means the entire building was constructed and designed with that in mind. As incredible as this may sound, this places our monument alongside Stonehenge, The Egyptian Pyramids at Giza, The Jantar Mantar of Jaipur, Angkor Wat, Chichen Itza, Great Zimbabwe and all the other monuments which track the movement of the earth around the sun.
