505 History and politics poems

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned: his forehead white with illumination — a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow, darkened as if the artist meant to contrast his bright knowledge, its dark subtext. By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait, he was already linked to an affair with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out across the centuries, his lips fixed as if he's just uttered some final word. The first time I saw the painting, I listened as my father explained the contradictions: how Jefferson hated slavery, though —out of necessity, my father said — had to own slaves; that his moral philosophy meant he could not have fathered those children: would have been impossible, my father said. For years we debated the distance between word and deed. I'd follow my father from book to book, gathering citations, listening as he named — like a field guide to Virginia — each flower and tree and bird as if to prove a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision. I did not know then the subtext of our story, that my father could imagine Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh — the improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites

I've come to this one grassy hill in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street, to a place a few red anemones & a sheaf of wheat on Darwish's grave. A borrowed line transported me beneath a Babylonian moon & I found myself lucky to have the shadow of a coat as warmth, listening to a poet's song of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string Caesar stole off Gilgamesh's lute. I know a prison of sunlight on the skin. The land I come from they also dreamt before they arrived in towering ships battered by the hard Atlantic winds. Crows followed me from my home. My coyote heart is an old runagate redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota, & I knew the bow before the arch. I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses & insects singing to me. My sacred dead is the dust of restless plains I come from, & I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth telling me of the roads behind & ahead. I go back to broken treaties & smallpox, the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy could be a reprobate whose inheritance is no more than a swig of firewater. The sun made a temple of the bones of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed & extinct animals live in your nightmares sharp as shark teeth from my mountains strung into this brave necklace around my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear saying to Judge Dundy, "I am a man," & now I know why I'd rather die a poet than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.

I’ve come to this one grassy hill in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street, to place a few red anemones & a sheaf of wheat on Darwish’s grave. A borrowed line transported me beneath a Babylonian moon & I found myself lucky to have the shadow of a coat as warmth, listening to a poet’s song of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string Caesar stole off Gilgamesh’s lute. I know a prison of sunlight on the skin. The land I come from they also dreamt before they arrived in towering ships battered by the hard Atlantic winds. Crows followed me from my home. My coyote heart is an old runagate redskin, a noble savage, still Lakota, & I knew the bow before the arch. I feel the wildflowers, all the grasses & insects singing to me. My sacred dead is the dust of restless plains I come from, & I love when it gets into my eyes & mouth telling me of the roads behind & ahead. I go back to broken treaties & smallpox, the irony of barbed wire. Your envoy could be a reprobate whose inheritance is no more than a swig of firewater. The sun made a temple of the bones of my tribe. I know a dried-up riverbed & extinct animals live in your nightmares sharp as shark teeth from my mountains strung into this brave necklace around my neck. I hear Chief Standing Bear saying to Judge Dundy, “I am a man,” & now I know why I’d rather die a poet than a warrior, tattoo & tomahawk.

You will recall the day the dead returned to the village. Name it now the nebula of perfect expulsion. These fragments of existence spin their enclosing web, unlock the uncertainty of grace. We are late. On the third day we will dance with the beer; the vessel will be prepared for the corrupted descent of power. Radiant in its bounded estate, the spirit knows itself as the guide who moves to erase her footsteps. So once again the dance negotiates the property of being strange, that absolute desire for falling. The red roof tiles slip into the morning fog There is a red silence all around us. It will take years to learn this coherent grammar. The oriole has established an evasive coherence, infinite, exact, with its place, there where the day seems set to honor the bird's expressive deceit. Logic always fails that Carolina wren. The propositional exactitude of a certain absence draws fire upon its wings. The bird knows itself a strict proposal of faith, a ground state that moves without an absolute space. Grammatical bird, attuned to roots and implication. Love is ancient evidence, an instrument constrained, jealous of its utility, in awe of its own death; every name embraces it.

of Azamor at the mouth of the Oum er Rbia River Province, Doukkala Dorantes’s slave, with Captain Castillo and myself Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca named in honor of Alhajahad grandson to the conqueror of Canaria, four far from a tribe, lost band of followers, at once master and slave, trader and healer lost, after shipwrecks, having starved, our thirst so great we drank salt as foretold by the Muslim woman from Hornachos We sought war and gold and souls among the barbarians, burned their villages, then separated, lost, but in the end escaped by the mercy en la pasión de nuestro redentor Jesucristo to tell the tale of the Seven Cities of Cíbola The hunger and thirst we endured the people always cured, whatever they had they gave us, warmed us by their fires, sheltered us People who mourned their dead children for a year, each morning before sunrise, the whole clan wept, noon and at daybreak, household didn’t eat for three months, so deep is their mourning for their children People of the bison, men naked, women and elders clothed in deerskin, the land parched, maizeless, they boiled their water with hot stones, we headed into the setting sun, following the maize road, surviving each day on a handful of deer fat, crossed the river, to the people who only ate polvos de paja,powders of grass, for four months of the year, they gave us flour and squash and frijoles and cotton mantles, we crossed the medranos, the people gave us beads and coral and emerald arrowheads We saw women in lengths of cotton, closed with ties in the front, half-sleeves of buckskin that touched the ground, and wearing shoes The people sought our blessings, thought we came from the sky, Estevanico speaking for us, as we passed through a great number of diverse languages, we knew six, but found a thousand differences We were fed on the hearts of deers, some feared and fled from us, the people having been chained by the ones who came before us, the ones we sought so feverishly to tell them No more killing No more chains, please Do no more harm, Holy Majesty, the wretched and disastrous end we suffered on account of our sins

In the valley of your art history book, the corpses stack in the back of a cart drawn by an ox whose rolling shoulder muscles show its considerable weight. He does this often. His velvet nostrils flare to indicate the stench. It’s the smell you catch after class while descending a urine-soaked subway stair on a summer night in a neighborhood where cabs won’t drive: the odor of dead flowers, fear multiplied a thousand times. The train door’s hiss seals you inside with a frail boy swaying from a silver hoop. He coughs in your direction, his eyes are burn holes in his face. Back in the fourteenth-century print lying in your lap, a hand white as an orchid has sprouted from the pyramid of flesh. It claws the smoky air. Were it not for that, the cart might carry green cordwood (the human body knobby and unplaned). Wrap your fingers around your neck and feel the stony glands. Count the holes in your belt loop for lost weight. In the black unfurling glass, study the hard planes of your face. Compare it to the prom picture in your wallet, the orchid pinned to your chest like a spider. Think of the flames at your high school bonfire licking the black sky, ashes rising, innumerable stars. The fingers that wove with your fingers have somehow turned to bone. The subway shudders between dark and light. The ox plods across the page. Think of everyone you ever loved: the boy who gets off at your stop is a faint ideogram for each. Offer him your hand. Help him climb the stair.

“We all declare for liberty,” Lincoln said. “We use the word and mean all sorts of things: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. Rifle the basket that thy neighbor brings.” The grizzled axman squinted at Honest Abe, The six feet four of him, gaunt, sad of face, The hands to split a log or cradle a babe, The cracked palm hat, the homespun of his race. “The wolf tears at the sheep’s throat: and the sheep Extols the shepherd for cudgeling tyranny; The wolf, convulsed with indignation deep, Accuses the shepherd of murdering liberty. “But the dictionary of the wolf is writ In words the rats of time chew bit by bit.”

The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy, And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy; For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects’ faith doth ebb, Which should not be if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web. But clouds of joys untried do cloak aspiring minds, Which turn to rain of late repent by changed course of winds. The top of hope supposed the root upreared shall be, And fruitless all their grafted guile, as shortly ye shall see. The dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds, Shall be unsealed by worthy wights whose foresight falsehood finds. The daughter of debate that discord aye doth sow Shall reap no gain where former rule still peace hath taught to know. No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port; Our realm brooks not seditious sects, let them elsewhere resort. My rusty sword through rest shall first his edge employ To poll their tops that seek such change or gape for future joy.

’Tis strange indeed to hear us plead For selling and for buying When yesterday we said: “Away With all good things but dying.” The world’s ago, and we’re agog To have our first brief inning; So let’s away through surge and fog However slight the winning. What deeds have sprung from plow and pick! What bank-rolls from tomatoes! No dainty crop of rhetoric Can match one of potatoes. Ye orators of point and pith, Who force the world to heed you, What skeletons you’ll journey with Ere it is forced to feed you. A little gold won’t mar our grace, A little ease our glory. This world’s a better biding place When money clinks its story.

Help me come up with a strategy to get through this white noise. — U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney, November 2001 Are we on the ground now? Ally cells and I said operations. We cleared 50% of a wonderful friend and enduring opposition. Take the solid. Louder. We clearly are loud. We are the postal system. No evidence has been information. Attacking the caves. Are you on the ground enduring? A wonderful friend ramped it up. You ought to open your mail. Opposition element: the air. The talents work with precision. 84%. The population attacking the caves, the talents work with the caves and tunnels. Hiding in caves, wavering in caves and hiding in mosques. A wonderful friend on the ground. Freedom I said: the enduring ally cells. Interested in the view, in our aid sensitivities. 50% to the front of our effort adding that 80% are willing to play. Independent oper-oppo-sition forces that are rosy. So make assumptions on the ground. Are we on the ground now? Can be more than air. The target. The air liaison. Campaign with the bombing and entirely happy. Attacking the leaflets. We keep working hiding in hiding in caves and cowering in cowering in cowering in caves and I could say confidential areas. The mosques and rest efforts are mad. Execution in the targeting of democracy. Those risks culti-targeting to minimize the individual. An obligation to the spirit of enterprise. A war of roundup freezing worldwide, and proceeding on course. Training facilities, proceeding on course, freezing their guided munitions. A population is tons of struggle against evil. A civilized world of innocents in the mud, an enemy that’s on the ground for there is no neutral ever. No neutral homeland. For the first time first time first time in history ordinary busi-security bioterror to defend enemies with the no-ness of life. Confident in destruction / complete and cause / certain of the rightness of this time / in the right / man the victories / to comment for a freer world history / committee of evil / defeat the forces / we will fight and great coalition wherever they are an era of over flight right against terror basing global terror the global trade and lives of our world improve / the modern alliance / I like citizens / but rather than the dust settle it could mean / as acknowledged / the carpet bombs precision bombs / as long as 23 months and I said go to America on alert / get a softball to school if you work / take your child / game this afternoon / game or a soccer to the president’s going to go to the game / the fight/ our new baseball game / to help us in our task / force will sign terrorists tracking American citizens / to protect level warriors / the decibel from these shadows / open your mail louder