Tecolote
The Mexican word for owl is tecolote, from the Nahuatl: tecolotl.
I think it sounds beautiful in both languages: both of my origins.
My favorite bird is the tecolote. The way it sits in the tree:
Wise insomniac, alone. Only company is rain. At night, it comes alive:
A little moon. A myth. A continent of leaves. At midnight: the tecolote
Transforms into a jaguar, into a python, into a dragon.
When I was younger, my mom used to tell me I was like
A tecolote because I would stay up late to watch Letterman or
Conan O’Brien. Then, as a teenager, I was a tecolote because I would
Go out late with friends and party. Now, at thirty-five, I’m getting
A tattoo of a tecolote on my forearm. Reminder of my childhood,
My ancestry, the night. Gracias, tecolote: protector of the moon and sky.
This poem is excerpted from The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss, and Connection (Storey Publishing, 2025), edited by Alison Hawthorne Deming, a unique collection of poems from diverse contemporary voices that offers a range of perspectives on humans’ complex relationship with animals, celebrating and bearing witness to the lives of animals both wild and domestic.
This is the first of four poems from the anthology (plus our podcast) reprinted in Terrain.org over the second week of November 2025.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020); Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024); The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025); and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, the Writers Center, and elsewhere.
Header photo by Ricardo Reitmeyer, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Jose Hernandez Diaz by Víctor Sánchez.
