I want to touch what aches in us, the light
we guard to stay alive. My dear, come quick.
I hear a knock; I’m afraid. Is it you?
I dare to open and let hope come through.
After four years, it has come to this:
I fear that all I love will go to ruins,
and my little son is playing on the dunes.
I have lived as free as a fragrance on the wind,
as shackled to the earth as the vine that produced it.
May I confess in a poem what is forbidden us in prose?
O fluorescent fire, O heat that singes but not does burn,
would that you could consume me, I might never rise again
to brave fascist bullets or heroically weed my vegetable beds.
When statues topple, they do little heaving.
You will not see them celebrate long their fall
or mount the wreckage on a wall.
(Who are you to ask that they applaud
your moment of awakening?
In the creak and give of floorboards,
hollow of trees felled by storms,
fists of despots, palms of departing lovers,
click of deadbolts, swing of doors;
To be trapped in an era, this era,
is the poet’s nightmare and delight. O future
readers—if there will be readers—what will you make
of this? What shall I—what shall we—bequeath you?
The true traitor lacks not morals but moral imagination. I shall
no longer grant the premise that we must debate amidst the
rubble of a world the unimaginative have plundered—
The last thing he saw was the joy in her eyes.
Back home the flowers have wilted and the balloon,
twisting slowly in the now-stale air,
sinks lower and lower to the ground.
I so want to be optimistic and airy, to write of
our generous spirit, to wax poetic about moon landings
and beach landings, entrepreneurship, sliced bread,
the assembly line, the World Wide Web. It feels un-American