Monica Collette Yriart

McLean, Virginia

Monica Collette Yriart was born in Montevideo, Uruguay on the Atlantic coast of South America. She was born to an Uruguayan father, Juan Felipe Yriart, and Washingtonian mother, Riley Collette Moore. Yrairt is an honors graduate of Swarthmore College, and the George Washington University National Law Center, where she obtained her Juris Doctor in 1987. Yrairt writes on comparative constitutional law in the context of Latin American History. Monica Yrairt has practiced law in labor, human rights and civil rights law and has taught legal writing and political science at the University of Memphis. She currently lives in McLean, VA where she writes and has a small legal practice. Her poetry focuses on creation and being, and one strand of this: human nature and culture. Within this she focuses on ideological positions and spiritual patterns in history.

The Pongid Hominid Ancestor

Hominus, deus...
The pongid-hominid ancestors'
Offspring in hills of
Olive and juniper walked,
Where the trees dried.
All hands and
That tree jumping crouch,
That would soon want a chair
Under it instead of a bough,
To relieve the walking.
Hung in sunbeams.
Cut by the edge of leaves,
"We" were fresh for physics,
Whose calculations in blood and light,
Rode on elemental forces,
Pinning high flung leaps to branches,
To branch, to branch, to branch,
Teaching rhythm and poetry,
A segmented world, acrobatics,
And music, variation and analogy,
Their bodies the apple,
In death, light,and spirit,
As Pythagoras would plunge
For the logic,
His mind was out
Like a flower,
In seminal spill;
He could say what was.
"Freehands", when the forest was gone,
In the Province of Teeth,
Extended hands
To reproduce what they knew from the trees
Far inside the mind,
In the matter abundance,
Rivers and logic,
From an education of trees.
And surprises of freedom
Still sound in cracked seamed crania,
Of gourds and vines by the horizon,
And the presents brought by time.