Poemunity — your poem community

Out of this roar of innumerable demons hot cinema tarzan sweat rolling moth ball eyes yellow teeth cries of claws slashes clanks a faint high pallor dust oceans rolling over the dry sand of the savanna your houses homes warm still with the buffalo milk bladder of elephant . tusk of his stripped tree sing soft clinks but the barracks the dark dark barks of the shark boys the cool juice of soweto . . . out of this dust they are coming our eyes listen out of rhinoceros thunder darkness of lion the whale roar stomping in heaven that black bellied night of hell and helleluia when all the lights of anger flicker flicker flicker flicker and we know somewhere there there is real fire basuto mokhethi namibia azania shaka the zulu kenyatta the shatt erer the maasai wandering into the everlasting shadow of jah daughters lost daughters bellowing against bullhorn and kleghorn bellowing against bargwart and the searchlights of dogs bellowing against crick and the kick in the stomach the acrid wretch against the teeth bellowing against malan malan malam malan and boer and boerwreck and boertrek and truckloads of metal helmet and fusil and the hand grenade and acid rhodes and the diamonds of oppenheimer the opulence of voortresshers the grass streiders . . . suddenly like that fire the crows in johannesburg you were there torn. in tears. tatters but the eyes glittered and the fist clenching around that scream of your mother bled into a black head of hammers and the night fell howl on soweto the night fell howl on soweto and we who had failed to listen all. those. foot. steps who had given you up like a torn paper package your heroes       burning in your houses rising from your dust bowls flaring from the sky listen now as the news items lengthen gathering like hawks looking upward like the leopard plunging into the turmoil like the constrictor and that crouch/shot shout out against that beast and pistol the police who shot patrice who castrated kimathi and clattering clattering clattering clattering the veldts gun metals wings rise from their last supper their hunger of bones bomba and the daniels sing ukufa akuqheleki kodwa ke kuthiwa akuhlanga lungehlanga lalani ngenxeba nikhuzeka

Lined up behind the space bartender is the meaning of it all, the vessels marked with letters, numbers, signs. Beyond the flats the monitor looms, for all the world like the world. Images and motions, weeping women, men in hats. I have killed many happy hours here, with my bare hands, where TV passes for IV, among the space cadets and dingbats.

The jade slipped from my wrist with the smoothness of water leaving the mountains, silk falling from a shoulder, melon slices sliding across the tongue, the fish returning. The bracelet worn since my first birthday cracked into thousand-year-old eggshells. The sound could be heard ringing across the water where my mother woke in her sleep crying thief. Her nightgown slapped in the wind as he howled clutching his hoard. The cultured pearls. The bone flutes. The peppermint disks of jade. The clean hole in the center, Heaven: the spaces we left empty.

Torquemada. Now that Castile and Aragon in holy wedlock are Spain, and the last city of the Moors in Spain is Spanish except for Moor and Jew— about every crucifix in every market-place and in the court itself the Jews!— as seven centuries of Christian valor, Christian piety triumph stay not your hand; Spain of the knights, one in fealty to your majesties, become one in faith, Spain of the saints! Like the sun, rising as our Savior from His tomb into the brilliant sky blaze until the clouds that still obscure the light are drawn into His brightness and earth is brilliant as the sky is bright. Spain newly united still divided— as the season of cold is the season of darkness in the spring of our rejoicing that the Moor is gone from Spain, the Jew go too! But if the Spaniard speaks, I speak no less a Christian: throw away the curse, you Jews, of fifteen hundred years; stay and prosper and Church and Heaven prosper, in our nets a goodly catch. Think not that we want aught of you but your souls; your money and your jewels— all your trash— keep if you stay and are Christian, take if you are Jews and go; we ask of you nothing but your Judaism which has brought you so much misery and will bring each of you— the youngest and the gentlest— to the flames of Hell and the worm that dies not. We give you, miserable sinners, the waters of Paradise; we give you the blessings of the saints, the blessings of Mary, the blessed mother of Christ, and the blessings of our Lord Jesus. Isabella. There is a sweet reasonableness in the words of our prior; it is Saint Dominic who speaks to us through his Dominican or Saint James himself. Abrabanel. No noble in your court, your majesties, proud of his forefather, conquering Goth or Visigoth or Vandal, is of an older Spanish line than we— Jews in Iberia before the Romans came. No noble boasting his service boasts of more than that Jew who through a thousand shoals and reefs piloted Aragon to Castile—your marriage and Spain’s glory. The rest of us, many tens of thousands, serve you humbly in smithy, field or vineyard, soldiers or physicians, as we have served in Spain two thousand years, Spaniards, true to your majesties as we are to the God of Israel—and of Spain, unlike the others only in our faith for which, if we must answer, we shall answer to our God. Torquemada. Since all we do, and each word spoken, if only in our hearts, must be in worship— not a leaf falls slowly but in His service— to be unlike us in our faith is to be unlike in everything. True, you Jews must answer to your God, and in the flames and burning ice of Hell forever you shall answer; but we too, priests, bishops, queen and king, must answer for you: farmer or captain answers; shall we be less answerable for souls? Abrabanel. You do not honor your God by bringing Him captives, like a mere emperor who must have retainers and retinue, serfs and forced labor; the loadstone without visible motion draws to itself every particle of iron; the sword—even though a winged angel swings it— served only to drive Adam from his paradise. Your fingers stiff with rings and jewels, you dishonor your faith, your majesties, by cruelty, give it whatever noble name you will as princes make a rogue knight or lord. Will thieves and pirates be gentler with us than your constables and soldiers?— your majesties will hear of many ripped up for the jewels it will be said they swallowed; many left by sailors to die on reefs and sandbars for a smock or a pair of hose; many dead of plague or found like birds in winter dead in the fields about towns or like fish upon a beach; many will die as slaves at work beasts would be fitter for but costlier, who have written a page of Castilian or handled a Toledo blade with the best. And yet the weak has each his strength, Spain of Spaniard, Basque, and Catalonian, Moor and Gypsy, else all beasts were tigers, all fish sharks, and only giants left; the stricken remember— as wounds and scars last longer than the blow— and if drops of water wear channels in the rock on which the earth itself is, in the action of centuries how powerful are tears. Would you have our religion like our clothes—for comfort and the eyes of men, put off at night, and we left lying naked in the darkness? The body is like roots stretching down into the earth— forcing still a way over stones and under rock, through sand, sucking nourishment in darkness, bearing the tread of man and beast, and of the earth forever; but the spirit— twigs and leaves spreading through sunshine or the luminous darkness of twilight, evening, night, and dawn, moving in every wind of heaven and turning to whatever corner of the sky is brightest, compelled by nothing stronger than the light; the body is like earth, the spirit like water without which earth is sand and which must be free or stagnant; or if the body is as water, the spirit is like air that must have doors and windows or else is stuffy and unbreathable— or like the fire of which sun and stars have been compounded, which Joshua could command but for an hour. Isabella. If our eye offends us, pluck it out! Even so, we will sweep away the Jews from every town and hamlet, field and corner of our dominion, though they are the sands for number. Go and begone—but stay as Christians; come and be dear to us, as the Prodigal! Abrabanel. We Jews have been accused of love of wealth, but not for all our wealth in Spain, fields and vineyards, houses of timber and houses of stone that we must leave, and all the wealth that will be stolen from us, will we stay; we Jews have been accused of arrogance, but not for all the dignities that we must leave, our offices and honors in this, the proudest court of Christendom, will we stay; we Jews have been accused of love of life, delighting in the flesh, but though we shall die along a thousand roads we will not stay— striking roots somewhere to flourish as we flourished, giving shade and fruit.

From the old bridge we’d been stopped on, a little below us, it looked like a diving board. When the girl switched her sign from Stop to Slow I saw across the river three men standing like old- fashioned divers at its base, newsreels we’d seen of men in swim caps. “Hard hats,” you literal you. You agreed with “like a diving board,” but no spring to it. Something below was holding it up, something concrete. It was the business of your life. Concrete— but for me the men were waiting their turn over there, each to compete for the best two-and-a-half gainer to knife the Tye River. They’d die, you said. “That’s a fine span,” I learned, “a very long one— they didn’t make ’em like that back then.” Or us either, I thought as I almost saw the Hard Hat bounce at the tip, his one knee up to his waist. “Inspectors,” you said as we drove across, “lolly- gagging.” Whichever. Our span is ready.

pues estoy creando spanglish bi-cultural systems scientific lexicographical inter-textual integrations two expressions existentially wired two dominant languages continentally abrazándose en colloquial combate en las aceras del soil imperio spanglish emerges control pandillaje sobre territorio bi-lingual las novelas mexicanas mixing with radiorocknroll condimented cocina lore immigrant/migrant nasal mispronouncements baraja chismeteos social club hip-hop prieto street salsa corner soul enmixturando spanish pop farándula standard english classroom with computer technicalities spanglish is literally perfect spanglish is ethnically snobbish spanglish is cara-holy inteligencia which u.s. slang do you speak?

We barge out of the womb with two of them: eyes, ears, arms, hands, legs, feet. Only one heart.  Not a good plan.  God should know we need at least a dozen, a baker’s dozen of hearts. They break like Easter eggs hidden in the grass, stepped on and smashed. My own heart is patched, bandaged, taped, barely the same shape it once was when it beat fast for you.

We’re writing our names with sizzles of light to celebrate the fourth. I use the loops of cursive, make a big B like the sloping hills on the west side of the lake. The rest, little a,r, one small b, spit and fizz as they scratch the night. On the side of the shack where we bought them, a handmade sign: Trailer Full of Sparkles Ahead, and I imagine crazy chrysanthemums, wheels of fire, glitter bouncing off metal walls. Here, we keep tracing in tiny pyrotechnics the letters we were given at birth, branding them on the air. And though my mother’s name has been erased now, I write it, too: a big swooping I, a hissing s, an a that sighs like her last breath, and then I ring belle, belle, belle in the sulphuric smoky dark.

In the middle of the night, father Brought me a falcon. By morning, it ripped the wire and flew the hill Into the highway. When they found me in that car My sleeve stemmed in blood, I didn’t know what it was I was trying to kill. I saw a craft of orphans steaming down the river. They were dressed in white and silent as a séance. It was then I spoke to the bird. Already God is shaking his black seed Back into me.

This was more like the atmosphere had been pinched, whose chirp was an unexpected gust in a harmonium enough to break all that high horse talk that curdles the atmosphere. While centaurs ate grass and hurdled epitaphs, that chirp in the midst did change one of us. 'Twas clawed out in a feeling’s flock 'Twas 'couraged by the tall grass