What if you can’t do well do good?
What if my electric car
And diligent recycling
Mean less than nothing to
The slave-wage worker
This is not the hour for poetry but for lovemaking, or
sleep. I grow tired, beseeching. An eagle circles my bedroom,
eying me lustily; her talons promise relief I’m not ready for.
I don’t know what poetry is.
At 33, I’ve read very little,
And written even less.
At school, on the other shore
Of the salty void
They’ve separated 2,000 children.
No, they’ve discarded them
Like cans of Coca-Cola,
2,000 children who reached our shore
Like sea foam, salty, crying salt,
A column of families marching for asylum,
The squirrels were dancing in the trees
On a cataract of leaves
Occluding the moon,
And fields of tobacco slept
Like unlit dreams.
A cold river divides us:
Cold currents, cold fish, cold limbs,
A carnival of shattered ice
They traverse, barefoot,
With bleeding feet, frostbitten blood,
To risk a safari of lethal ice.
If I baptized ghosts
And knew that they were ghosts;
If I consorted with hallucinations
And accepted the pain of false association;
If I planted a Willow
How easy to lose control of the comet that
streaks in our hearts from the first to the last!
To forsake our mother tongue
for the vernacular of adulthood!
I have dreamed of Granada
And her Roman streets of mucus and neglected stones,
The high fever of her summer,
And the inedible olives of her femininity.
I awoke in darkness beneath the moon
Where the light was dim, but for a slender ray
That fell upon my face, and none other.
Orchards of dreams were disguised
As beggars crooning a song of desolation,
And the profligate morning birds
Were still asleep, resting their dainty warbles.