Natal – 1950

 

Nenhum Natal será possível: sei

que tudo enfim suspenso aguarda

não já Natais sempre de guerra mas

a morte iluminada como aurora

entre esta gente que se junta rindo

e as luzes interiores, muitas cabeças juntas;

entre as lágrimas de ternura e os murmúrios de esperança,

entre as vozes e os silêncios, as pedras e as árvores,

entre muralhas de janelas sob a chuva,

entre agonias dos que lutam porque são mandados

e a cobarde angústia dos que apenas mandam,

no meio da vida, círculo de fogo,

à luz de que se vê uma calçada suja

de restos de comida e de papéis rasgados

– se sei, embora saiba, quanto soube:

ah canto do meu canto, olhar do meu olhar,

nenhum Natal, bem sei, mas outra gente,

e tanta gente, e mesmo que um só fosse,

já louco, envelhecido, apenas hábito,

que poderei fazer, senão humildemente

cantar?

Jorge de Sena

in, Natais in Pedra Filosofal

Declaration of Interdependence

 

Unsplash

 

Such has been the patient sufferance…

We’re a mother’s bread, instant potatoes, milk at a checkout line. We’re her three children pleading for bubble gum and their father. We’re the three minutes she steals to page through a tabloid, needing to believe even stars’ lives are as joyful and bruised.

Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury…

We’re her second job serving an executive absorbed in his Wall Street Journal at a sidewalk café shadowed by skyscrapers. We’re the shadows of the fortune he won and the family he lost. We’re his loss and the lost. We’re a father in a coal town who can’t mine a life anymore because too much and too little has happened, for too long.

A history of repeated injuries and usurpations…

We’re the grit of his main street’s blacked-out windows and graffitied truths. We’re a street in another town lined with royal palms, at home with a Peace Corps couple who collect African art. We’re their dinner-party talk of wines, wielded picket signs, and burned draft cards. We’re what they know: it’s time to do more than read the New York Times, buy fair-trade coffee and organic corn.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress…

We’re the farmer who grew the corn, who plows into his couch as worn as his back by the end of the day. We’re his TV set blaring news having everything and nothing to do with the field dust in his eyes or his son nested in the ache of his arms. We’re his son. We’re a black teenager who drove too fast or too slow, talked too much or too little, moved too quickly, but not quick enough. We’re the blast of the bullet leaving the gun. We’re the guilt and the grief of the cop who wished he hadn’t shot.

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor…

We’re the dead, we’re the living amid the flicker of vigil candlelight. We’re in a dim cell with an inmate reading Dostoevsky. We’re his crime, his sentence, his amends, we’re the mending of ourselves and others. We’re a Buddhist serving soup at a shelter alongside a stockbroker. We’re each other’s shelter and hope: a widow’s fifty cents in a collection plate and a golfer’s ten-thousand-dollar pledge for a cure.

We hold these truths to be self-evident…

We’re the cure for hatred caused by despair. We’re the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name, the tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We’re every door held open with a smile when we look into each other’s eyes the way we behold the moon. We’re the moon. We’re the promise of one people, one breath declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.

Richard Blanco

Bypass – The Two Voices

 

 Like a man and a woman – arguing

The ego’s two voices do their thing

All day and night, the story goes

Like a river, a continuous flow

A conflicting conversation as old as time

Yet told with the subtlety of an ancient rhyme

The first one says it’s never enough

The second calls the former’s bluff

And thinks itself on a higher plane

But it’s really just the first again.

Playing the trickster, making a fool,

Turning your intentions back on you.

Using an insidious form of bypass,

To avoid looking in the looking-glass.

Aaron Waddell

No Closure

 

Not had closure cannot be enough

You always were a guy tough

Smoothened the diamond rough

And then I was left second guessing

The sky the clouds the rainbows

the sunrise increasingly distressing

Love we cannot have

Friends we cannot be

What else is left for me to be?

A writer of pomes and dreadful tomes?

Explain where the deceit came in?

When lies were hidden from the beginning?

What am I to you?

Just another lark a song?

Why did you do me this wrong

Why did you pick me from the throngs?

Tell me all for I cannot hold it longer

I will take it to my resting place

Please tell me all Can things get any wronger?

For once revive me from this daze

The Muse

Praise Song for the Day

  

Each day we go about our business,

walking past each other, catching each other’s

eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is

noise and bramble, thorn and din, each

one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning

a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,

repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,

with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,

with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky.

A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words

spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,

words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark

the will of some one and then others, who said

I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.

We need to find a place where we are safe.

We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,

who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built

brick by brick the glittering edifices

they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.

Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,

the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,

others by first do no harm or take no more

than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,

love that casts a widening pool of light,

love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,

any thing can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Elizabeth Alexander