505 History and politics poems

(For all children who wondered about the tragic event of April 4, 1968 at Memphis.) My children, my children, remember the day When the Drum Major of Freedom's parade went away. Stop crying now little children and listen And you will know for the future what really did happen. You will know why your father was solemn and grim And why mother's eyes were wet at the rim. You will know why the flags flew at half mast And why all the buildings were shut tight and fast. The Drum Major was down in Memphis that day Helping the workers to win a raise in pay When an evil assassin's bullet Snuffed his bright young life away. That's why we were all so saddened that day When the life of the Drum Major was taken away. Who will come forward to stand in his stead? Who'll be the Drum Major in the Freedom parade? My children, our Major was such a good man Whose life was based on the divine plan. He loved this country, its people black and white And believed that all should be imbued with the right. That's why we were all so saddened that day When the life of the Drum Major was taken away. We are looking for someone to stand in his stead We now seek a new leader for the Freedom parade. Do you know my children that he bore the brunt, He marched unafraid right up in the front He marched for Justice for children like you And a bountier life for your parents too. That's why we honor Martin Luther King He tried with love to make Liberty ring. He wished everyone in our tortured country To live together in peace and harmony. That's why we were all so saddened that day When the Drum Major's life was taken away. Do you know someone who can stand in his stead? Do you know someone to lead the parade? I hear you my children. I hear what you said. That you children yourselves would lead his parade That you'll carry the banner of the Drum Major dear And march on to full Freedom without any fear. Our spirits are lifted, our sorrows subside. You children shall lead us with Dr. King at your side. You children of Freedom will stand in his stead. You children of Freedom will lead the parade. March on my children to his distant drumbeat. March on my children, keep alive his heartbeat. When this Peace and Freedom is finally won Then will Martin Luther King's work be done.

for Gloria Imagining, on a long walk between two Greek towns, those Turkish prisoners the guidebook says were sabred where they crowded together on the stone dock; and then imagining—still walking, anxious to see some worker in the fields or another old couple like the last one (he riding the donkey, she leading it in black)— the Greeks whom the Germans shot; and as the road after rising leads down again, at last to the town by the bay, imagining all the feuds given license by the civil war, the woman whose husband, forgive him his faults now, steps dead through the doorway one night: imagining, imagining—is there a way out of this brooding ahead to the hollow thud of the first dirt thrown down on his coffin? What is the word any tongue can make good for the boy— let someone else name his country— who speaks to his sleeping wife when he leaves at night, his brother tagging after him, one puny gun between them? If his cold spirit can still speak her name tomorrow, won’t she feel even more alone? Aeneas carried a high purpose on the point of his sword: a city needed founding, if not here then in another place. This road, though, dips past two ordinary houses and then the disco casting a stale abandoned shade, sharp-edged, to one side, and I descend— through hot odd-angled streets lined with those plane trees whose name’s so bland and awkward translated out of sunny Greek or Spanish— to the huge white plane-tree-shaded square. At the cafe in the open air I order lemonade from the waitress who has just served the little table crowded round by seven or eight, a changing group—the eager interpreter talking and listening at the same time, three young women dressed up, and even in this small town the four military men from the foreign ship offshore, out of uniform but with an apparent eye for swag some future day, talking of small deals, clever braveries, travels. They exact smiles and attentions and never have they seen such a pretty town as this, never. The three women listen hard to the roared harsh sounds of the odd tongue, then impatiently to the interpreter while the military men wait. What could such noise be about? Do these men love the ways ours do, do they like their women to speak to them in bed, to say what they want, to say it? The Turkish prisoners had been led outside with the lie that they’d be freed. Inside the smoky small bar so they can watch without being watched, young men are bitter, imagining the weight of medals, coming one by one to the dusty window-glass then returning toward the far unlit interior. The lemonade arrives at last in the pretty hands of the waitress, she puts it on my white table under the plane trees and hurries away to be near the laughing group, foreign men who one day may bring something new to the town, or something old. for Gloria

(John P. Altgeld, Governor of Illinois and my next-door neighbor, 1893-1897. Born December 30, 1847; died March 12, 1902.) Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the stone. Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own. “We have buried him now,” thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced. They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced. They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you day after day, Now you were ended. They praised you . . . and laid you away. The others that mourned you in silence and terror and truth, The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth, The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor, That should have remembered forever . . . remember no more. Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call, The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall? They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones, A hundred white eagles have risen the sons of your sons, The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man. Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the stone, Time has its way with you there and the clay has its own. Sleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise man that kindled the flame— To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name, To live in mankind, far, far more . . . than to live in a name.

1. Look here, Marcus Aurelius, we’ve come to see your temple, deluded the guards, crawled through a hole in the fence. Why your descendent, my guide and friend has opted for secrecy, I don’t know. But I do know what to call the Africans, passport-less, yellow-eyed who will ride the boat before me for Naples, they hope. Here the sea curls its granite lip at them and flings a winter storm like a cough, or the seadog drops them at Hannibal’s shores, where they’ll stand stupefied like his elephants. What dimension of time will they cross at the Hours loop tight plastic ropes round their ankles and wrists? What siren song will the trucks shipping them back to Ouagadougou drone into their ears? I look at them loitering, waiting for the second act of their darkness to fall. I look at the sky shake her dicey fists. One can be thankful, I suppose, for not being one of them, and wrap the fabric of that thought around oneself to keep the cold wind at bay. But what world is this that makes our lives sufficient even as the horizon’s rope is about to snap, while the sea and sky ache to become an open-ended road? That’s what we’re all waiting for, a moment to peel itself like skin off fruit, and let us in on its sweetness as we wait, smoking, or fondling provisions, listening the engine’s invocational purr. In an hour that will dawn and dusk at once, one that will stretch into days strung like beads on the horizon’s throat, they will ride their tormented ship as the dog star begins to float on the water, so bright and still, you’d want to scoop it out in the palm of your hand. 2. A pair of Roman fists robbed of spear and shield; the tiles of the tapestries mixed in with popcorn that slipped from the buttery hands, aluminum wrappers smudged with processed cheese; countless cigarette butts surround the fallen columns and beams with a fringe of tarnished foam; pairs of panties still hot with forbidden passion… The ruins are not ruined. Without all this garbage packed, stratified, how else to name our age? 3. Earlier, I had walked the market of Sabratha, changed to its people, but like my old city brought me back to me. The petty merchants, all selling the same goods, shouted out jokes to each other. A Sudanese waiter carried a tray with a giant pot of green tea with mint. Among the older men, their heads capped with crimson shennas, I kept seeking my father’s face. An old lust wafted past me when the abaya-clad women, scented with knock-off Chanel, sashayed by. The sawdust floors of the shawarma and falafel eateries, the sandwich maker dabbing insides of loaves with spoons of searing harissa, my mouth watering to a childhood burn. Pyramids of local oranges, late season pomegranates, radish and turnip bulbs stacked like billiard balls, and the half carcasses of lambs as if made of wax and about to melt off their hooks, the trays of hearts, kidneys, brains and testicles arrayed in slick arabesques. The hand-woven rugs where the extinct mouflon thrives, mincers, hairdryers, and toasters, their cords tentacles drooping from rusty shelves. It was as if my eyes were painting, not seeing, what I saw, my memory slowly building the scene until it assembled whole. What face did my face put on in the midst of transfiguration? I know what the eyes of the men my age said, settled now in comfortable middle age, about the life I left behind. True, I did envy them the asceticism of their grace, where a given horizon becomes a birthright—to drive or walk past the same hills all your life, to eat from the same tree and drink from the well that gave you your name. 4. Though for centuries the locals broke the statues’ limbs and ground them to make primitive pottery, enough remains to echo all that has disappeared: you and the woman leave the towpath, and you brace her against the trunk of an oak. It’s not the moonlight, but refractions from suburban homes trapped under cloud-cover that make her bronze skin glow among glistening trees. First, God made love: the canopy like the inside of an emerald, her lips a rush of cochineal. Then a route of evanescence brought her from Carthage into these living arms, here. 5. “A nice time, “ he tells us, how he and four cousins crossed the desert heading home on top of three-years’ worth of meager pay (the tarp ballooning, a giant dough) roped to a truck. Wearing the goggles of the welder he'd hoped to become, he looked at the sky and wondered “what those flying, smoke on their tails, thought of us.” Later, deported in a cargo plane, he handed the Tuareg soldiers one of his fake passports, and they like “space aliens” (in shabby uniforms, sunglasses, tribal veils) poured into his face. As the propellers’ hammering calmed to a shuddering hum, he saw the stars, “hundreds of them like gnats” swarm Mt. Akakous’ peak. “My next road is the water,” he says serving us tonight, and we promise, if the coffee is good, to put him on the next boat to the moon shining over Syracuse. 6. Suddenly, I find your descendant’s hands leafing through my chapters, scribbling a note in the margin of my thoughts: “How is it,” he asks, “that starlight announces the hour: how can a song divide desire in two?” “My flame,” I must have written or said, “coated her body like silk, one kiss spreading threads of lightening into her pores, until she became a sob, barely lifted by the wind, and I became mist, the shadow of a statue at the break of dawn.” To that he responds, “a Platonic echo;” and “What will come of such a plasticine love?” Marcus Aurelius, your descendent knows I’ll leave as I arrive, so empty he gets lost in me. 7. Two centuries ago, one of my ancestors sat on one of the communal latrines in mid-morning and listened to Apuleius’s defense. Across from him on that marble hexagon, sat two other men. On normal days they’d have talked about the olive harvest, the feast of Venus coming soon. But today they listen to the Madaurian’s high eloquence studded with jokes, cracking their own one-liners, shaking their heads in delight. Away from the hot midday sun and the throngs, you could say, they had the best seats in the house, and so they lingered and heard as much as they could then went about their business. So what if a man maries an older woman for her money, what impoverished young Roman in his right mind wouldn’t do that? And sure too, if some man comes to take your inheritance, even if he’s your best friend, even if he takes good care of your mother, you’d be a fool not to sue him to the Council, even if you’d have to accuse him falsely of black magic. That’s the beauty of it, or rather, whoever is going to win will have to make us trust beauty, that things being already right, can be more right, which is what “beautiful” really means. And what better way, to take in all this refinement than hearing it in a latrine where only beauty shields you from the awful stuff of life. 8. Marcus Aurelius, the men at the shore follow your path into eternity, though they already see their journey as a quarrel with circumstance, their lives abscesses feeding on the universe’s hide, tumors in detention camps, in basement kitchens. Their pockets filled with drachmas, they’ll lift diffident heads and drag feet lead-heavy with shame. One of them is now driving a taxi in Thessaloniki or Perugia. With enough of the language to understand direction, he engages his late night passengers. In the light of the dashboard they’ll entrust him with their secrets. With time, he’ll become a light unto himself, his car a winged chariot of human folly, and his responses to them saplings nourished in the dark soil of philosophy. It’s the gift of seasons that stray from the earth, when soul reigns incidental to flesh, forgiving to no end, a light that has long surpassed itself. 9. The birds that drew the line to the first distance remain nameless to me— creamy white breasts, gold dust around their eyes, black/brown (dark roast) wings. The deserts they crossed, the plains east or north of here fall like sand from my hands. Um Bsisi, I want to call them, citizens of a protracted destiny, native and stranger, prodigal and peasant— admit now, they you’re none of these, that you’re not any, or even all of them combined. 10. Southwest of here is Apuleius’s hometown, his inescapable destination having spent his inheritance on travel and studies. “Lacking the poverty of the rich,” he’s splurged, a month-long trip to the Olympic games; and openhanded, he gifted his mentors their daughters’ doweries. Few return to Madaura once gone, and when heading back shamefaced like him, they’d do as he did, taking the longest route hoping the journey would never end. Here in Sabratha, the widow hooked him, or he let her reel him, and that’s how that sordid business happily ended as it began. I look out toward Madaura, my back to the theater and the latrines, Madaura birthplace of Augustine, site of his first schooling—little Augustine holding a satchel of scrolls and a  loaf of bread for the teacher, awakened by his mother, his tiny feet cold in tiny sandals, his stomach warm with a barley porridge my grandmother used to make, forced to slurp it, sweetened with honey from the Atlas, a sprinkling of cinnamon and crushed almonds from the family farm. If the world is that sweet and warm, if it is that mothering, why then this perpetual scene of separation, this turning out into the cold toward something he knew he’d love? He lets go of the neighbors’ boy’s hand warming his own. He refuses the warm porridge forever, renounces his mother’s embrace. It only lasted a month, this partial answer, because even then everyone knew that the sweet fruit they grew housed the bitterest seeds, that piety is its own reward while belief only darkens and deepens like the sea before them, a place meant for those seeking life other than on this dry earth. That’s why prophets were welcomed here, calmly, because God was like rain and they like the saplings which know only the first verse to the sky’s rainless hymn. And that’s why Africa’s tallest minaret looms unfinished, visible from the next town over, and for fifty leagues from the sea if it were turned into a lighthouse for the ships that no longer come. The merchant who’d built it, money made from smuggling subsidized goods to Carthage and used Renaults from Rotterdam, ran out of money, could not afford the mosque that was to stand next to it, leaving its gray concrete bleaching in the sun. There’s enough history here to enable anyone to finish the thought. It’s useless then to track the fate of these travelers, some, without life jackets, had never learned how to swim. Why not let them live in text as they do in life?—they’ve lived without words for so long—why not release them from the pen’s anchor and let them drift to their completion? 11. In a few weeks you’ll see pedants here with binoculars trying to catch a glimpse of the Ramadan crescent, and if these migrants stick around here time will belong to the departure of other travelers, flocks of Um Bsisi follwing the sun’s arch, Japanese and Korean trawlers sailing to Gibraltar or Suez chasing the last herring or sardine. Where is she now in her time?— her life dissolved in other people’s minutes, a sense of solitude her diligent companion even when she lets go of herself to kindness. He’ll be there when she returns from the party, he’ll lie beside her when she sleeps. He’ll say, “Time belongs to the species, but your life belongs to me.” She’ll laugh at his words, and remember what you, Marcus Aurelius, had said about losing only the moment at hand, how it circles in a ring of dead nerves, how we stand impoverished before what is to come. She’ll have her answer to your elocution; she’d always had an answer for you, one she refuses to share even with herself. 12. At last they set to sail. They slaughter a rooster, douse blood on the Dido figurehead adorning the prow. The seadog opens a canvas bag and pulls out a hookah. His Egyptian assistant fills the smoke chamber with seawater, twists the brass head into it, caking the slit with sand. He fills the clay bowl with apple-flavored tobacco, wraps it with foil, pokes it tenderly with a knife. He picks embers from the going fire, places a few on the aluminum crown, and inhales and blows until the bottom vessel fills with a pearly fog, the color of semen, I think, then hands the pipe hose to the seadog who inhales his fill and hands it over to the travelers in turn. The air smells sweet around us, the breeze blows it away and brings it back tinged with iodine. Their communion done, they embark except the one who stands, the dead rooster in his hand, as if wanting to entrust it to us, then digs a hurried hole to bury it in. The boat, barely visible, leaves a leaden lacey ribbon aiming directly for the burnt orange sun. As it reddens, for a moment, their standing silhouettes eclipse it. Then the sea restores its dominion, dark as the coffee cooling in our cups. Dangling from the vine arbor, the lights reflect a constellation on the table’s dark top. I trace my fingers among them, hoping conjecture would shine on the mind’s calculus. Between my unquiet eddies, Marcus Aurelius, and the coursing water, the travelers’ moment sails, its tentacles sewing a rupture I had nursed for too long.

I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. That woman's days were spent In ignorant good-will, Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, She rode to harriers? This man had kept a school And rode our wingèd horse; This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all. Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

(In memory of Joseph Mary Plunkett) ("Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.")

O my dark Rosaleen, Do not sigh, do not weep! The priests are on the ocean green, They march along the deep. There’s wine from the royal Pope, Upon the ocean green; And Spanish ale shall give you hope, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope, Shall give you health, and help, and hope, My Dark Rosaleen! Over hills, and thro’ dales, Have I roam’d for your sake; All yesterday I sail’d with sails On river and on lake. The Erne, at its highest flood, I dash’d across unseen, For there was lightning in my blood, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! O, there was lightning in my blood, Red lighten’d thro’ my blood. My Dark Rosaleen! All day long, in unrest, To and fro, do I move. The very soul within my breast Is wasted for you, love! The heart in my bosom faints To think of you, my Queen, My life of life, my saint of saints, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! To hear your sweet and sad complaints, My life, my love, my saint of saints, My Dark Rosaleen! Woe and pain, pain and woe, Are my lot, night and noon, To see your bright face clouded so, Like to the mournful moon. But yet will I rear your throne Again in golden sheen; ‘Tis you shall reign, shall reign alone, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! ‘Tis you shall have the golden throne, ‘Tis you shall reign, and reign alone, My Dark Rosaleen! Over dews, over sands, Will I fly, for your weal: Your holy delicate white hands Shall girdle me with steel. At home, in your emerald bowers, From morning’s dawn till e’en, You’ll pray for me, my flower of flowers, My Dark Rosaleen! My fond Rosaleen! You’ll think of me through daylight hours My virgin flower, my flower of flowers, My Dark Rosaleen! I could scale the blue air, I could plough the high hills, Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer, To heal your many ills! And one beamy smile from you Would float like light between My toils and me, my own, my true, My Dark Rosaleen! My fond Rosaleen! Would give me life and soul anew, My Dark Rosaleen! O, the Erne shall run red, With redundance of blood, The earth shall rock beneath our tread, And flames wrap hill and wood, And gun-peal and slogan-cry Wake many a glen serene, Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! The Judgement Hour must first be nigh, Ere you can fade, ere you can die, My Dark Rosaleen!

Les Filles du Roi (1668) French men are marrying Indian women. It will have to be stopped. Wives will have to be found. French wives for French men. And so the call goes out to all the unfortunates in France. Women without homes, without family, poor women, women alone. Women with no dowries to buy a husband. Becomes a Fille du Roi, a Daughter of the King. Each woman considers her options. The hardships she doesn’t know are preferable to the ones she knows too well. As a Daughter of the King, she will have a dowry, payable to her husband at the time of marriage. She will have a home, the possibility of children, a place in the community. Women come from Ile de France, from Normandy, 800 women in ten years. Les Filles du Roi. Une Fille du Roi, 1668 Marie Mazol is thirty three years old when she becomes a Daughter of the King. She will bring 300 livres to her marriage to Antoine Roy-Desjardins. She will have money for her own use as well, for expenses, they promise her. She thought it would go further, but what she takes with her are a coffer, a cap, a taffeta handkerchief, a shoe ribbon, a hundred needles, a comb, a pair of stockings, a pair of gloves, a pair of scissors, two knives, a thousand pins, a bonnet, and four laces. Thus prepared, she faces marriage to a man she doesn’t know, in a country she’s never seen. Les Filles du Roi—Afterwards The Daughters of the King become wives. But French and Indian keep marrying. Their descendants will say, “Scratch a Frenchman, find an Indian.”

Oh, slow to smite and swift to spare, Gentle and merciful and just! Who, in the fear of God, didst bear The sword of power, a nation’s trust! In sorrow by thy bier we stand, Amid the awe that hushes all, And speak the anguish of a land That shook with horror at thy fall. Thy task is done; the bond are free: We bear thee to an honored grave, Whose proudest monument shall be The broken fetters of the slave. Pure was thy life; its bloody close Hath placed thee with the sons of light, Among the noble host of those Who perished in the cause of Right.

The ground cracked like the rough pit of a peach and snapped in two. The sun behind the mountains turned into an olive-green glow. To niña Gloria this was home. She continued to sell her bowl of lemons, rubbing a cold, thin silver Christ pocketed in her apron. Others like Lito and Marvin played soldiers in the ruins of a school, running around mounds of bricks, shooting chickens and pigs. No one knows exactly how a light film of ash appeared on everyone’s eyelids early in the morning or how trout and mackerel plunged from the sky, twitched, leaped through the streets. Some say the skin of trees felt like old newspaper, dry and yellow. Others believe the soapsuds washed aside in rivers began to rise in their milk. One Monday morning, a rain fell and the cemetery washed into the city. Bones began to knock and knock at our doors. Streets became muddy rivers waiting for bodies to drop among piles of dead fish. In a year, everyone stabbed flowers on a grave. This explains why women thought and moved like lizards under stones, why men heard bees buzzing inside their skulls, why dogs lost their sense of smell sniffing piles of rubble to get back home. In a few years, no one cared about turtles banging their heads against rocks, bulls with their sad, busted eyes, parrots that kept diving into creeks, the dark swelling of the open ground or at night a knife stained the kitchen cloth. Instead, niña Gloria swept the ground, the broom licking her feet at each stroke. At the bus station, Marvin shined military boots, twenty-five cents a pair, reduced his words to a spit, a splutter of broken sentences on shoe polish, leather. In the evenings, he counted coins he’d tossed in a jar, then walked home, one step closer to the cracked bone clenched in the yellow jaw of a dog.