YAUCO, Puerto Rico - David E. Mercado, a Cold War and Post-Cold War veteran with deployments around the globe and lifelong resident of Puerto Rico’s southern mountains, has released Poemas y Reflexiones (also published as DEM: Poesías de mis Memorias), a collection of 100 poems and reflections drawn from his life, memories, and imagination.
Arriving quietly without fanfare, the book reflects Mercado’s focus on recording life rather than chasing spectacle.
The poems move between grounded recollections and imagined journeys. One moment, he’s a barefoot boy cutting coffee in the hills of Yauco, hands sore, lessons learned early. Next, he imagines himself a soldier shivering through a Korean winter, reflecting on his father’s experiences there. Then suddenly—space, time travel, galaxies. A pause. Back home again.
Much of the collection centers on Mercado’s rural upbringing as a joven campesino. He sketches scenes of coffee harvests, parental discipline, and the quiet pride of his peasant life. Those early years, he suggests, never really leave you; they follow you into adulthood, into uniform, and into old age.
Mercado’s military service, like his father’s, forms another central theme. He writes about his father in Korea with restrained depictions of cold landscapes, lost friends, and the long return home. There is no triumphal tone—just memory and weight. Mercado often describes himself as a “soldier of shadows and faith,” a phrase that surfaces again and again, as if he’s still working out its meaning.
Interwoven throughout the book are the so-called “Cosmic Sagas,” poems that step entirely away from realism. A time traveler crosses eras of barter and steel, searching for humanity’s origin among stars and galaxies. These sections don’t explain themselves, and they don’t need to. They feel less like science fiction and more like philosophical detours: brief escapes or reflections viewed from afar.
Family anchors the work. Mercado dedicates poems to his mother, Rosa María, and to a father figure, Néstor, both portrayed as models of endurance and integrity. He also writes at length about Yauco itself—its barrios, crops, and people. Even a local shoeshiner earns a place. No one is too small to remember.
The final poems turn inward: aging, love, faith. Wrinkles become evidence, not flaws. Life, he writes, is like wine; it deepens. His faith in God appears not as doctrine but as gratitude for survival, framed as a blessing, with endurance as grace.
Mercado’s work is tangible, painstakingly compiled over years from notebooks and loose pages, intended as an honest legacy.
About the Author
David E. Mercado is a Puerto Rican author, Cold War and Post-Cold War veteran, and lifelong resident of Yauco. A former coffee-field worker, cafeteria attendant, soldier, husband, and father of two, he writes to preserve memory, faith, and lived experience through poetry and reflection.
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