505 History and politics poems

Would you be well receiv’d where’er you go, Remember each Man vanquish’d is a Foe: Resist not therefore to your utmost Might, But let the Weakest think he’s sometimes right; He, for each Triumph you shall thus decline, Shall give ten Opportunities to shine; He sees, since once you own’d him to excel, That ’tis his Interest you should reason well.

He has sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people He has plundered our— ravaged our— destroyed the lives of our— taking away our— abolishing our most valuable— and altering fundamentally the Forms of our— In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. —taken Captive on the high Seas to bear—

Baton Rouge, 1940 These are savannas bluer than your dreams Where other loves are fashioned to older music, And the romantic in his light boat Puts out among flamingos and water moccasins Looking for the river that went by last year. Even the angels wear confederate uniforms; And when the magnolia blooms and the honeysuckle, Golden lovers, brighter than the moon, Read Catullus in the flaring light Of the burning Negro in the open eye of midnight. And the Traveller, moving in the hot swamps, Where every human sympathy sends up the temperature, Comes of a sudden on the hidden glacier, Whose motives are blonder than Hitler’s choir boys. Here is the ambiguous tenderness of ’gators Trumpeting their loves along a hundred miles Of rivers writhing under trees like myths— And human existence pursues the last, The simple and desperate life of the senses. Since love survives only as ironic legend— Response to situations no longer present— Men lacking dignity are seized by pride, Which is the easy upper-class infection. The masters are at home in this merciless climate But deep in the caves of their minds some animal memory Warns of the fate of the mammoth at the end of the ice-age; As sleeping children a toy, they hug the last, fatal error, But their eyes are awake and their dreams shake as with palsy. Over Birmingham where the blast furnace flowers And beyond the piney woods in cotton country, Continually puzzling the pale aristocrats, The sun burns equally white man and black. The labor which they do makes more and more Their brotherhood condition for their whole existence; They mint their own light, and their fusing fires Will melt at last these centuries of ice. This is a nightmare nimble in the Big House, Where sleepers are wakeful, cuddling their terror, In the empty acres of their rich beds, dreaming Of bones in museums, where the black boys yawn.

Before the break of day the minister was awakened by the sound of hatchets breaking open the door and windows. He ran towards the door: about twenty Indians with painted faces were coming into the house howling. Three Indians took hold of him, and bound him as he stood in his night-shirt, and began to rifle the house going into every room. As he lay, bound and helpless, he thought of his wife and children— his wife had given birth only a few weeks before— and he remembered the passage in Isaiah: “I shall go to the gates of the grave deprived of the rest of my years. . .” The Indians had taken two of his children to the door and killed them, as well as the Negro woman who helped take care of them; keeping him bound with the cord about one arm, they let him put on his clothes with the other; and let his wife dress herself, too, as well as their children left alive. When the sun was an hour high all were led out of the house for the journey of three hundred miles to Quebec— snow up to their knees. Many of the houses were now on fire; and, as they left the town, he saw his house and barn burning. At first the minister was not allowed to speak to any of his fellow captives as they marched, but on the second day he had another Indian to watch him and was allowed to speak with his wife when he overtook her and could walk with her and help her along. She told him that she was losing her strength and they must expect to part and she hoped that God would keep him alive and their children still among the living— but not a word of complaint saying that it was the will of God. When they came to a small river the captives had to wade it; the water knee-deep and the current swift. After that they had to climb a hill, almost a mountain, and the minister’s strength was almost gone when he came to the top; but he was not allowed to sit down and even unburdened of his pack. He begged the Indian in charge of him to let him go down and help his wife but the man would not let him; and he asked each of the captives as they passed about her; and heard at last that in going through the river she fell and plunged headfirst into the water; and, after that, at the foot of the hill the Indian who held her captive killed her with one stroke of his hatchet and left the body as meat for the fowls and beasts.

How easily our lives could have been easier if our fathers hadn't done in whoever stood in their way. Did progress demand they set factories belching smoke like volcanoes? You're right to be dumbfounded as to why you're forced to spend your time making up for your ancestors' mistakes, waste this beautiful day restoring ruined shrines and temples so that the gods might not abandon Rome for good. There could be a turn about: after they were rid of the Etruscans, a few farsighted countrymen had the savvy to steal their fine sarcophagi designs, along with the booty. Decadence is your legacy. I hold out hope for satires, epigrams, and odes, but heaping on the gore is not an answer, and our plays are weak echoes of the Greeks. If you want to have some say in the way things are, put yourself in the hands of a higher order. Have faith in faith. Bow down to the gods who oversee and underwrite and sponsor. There's nothing empirical left to this empire now. What would have been routine raids on small fry republics—from Vietnam to the Isle of Man— are beaten back, and the opposition, in ecstatic mockery, turn our spoils to souvenir necklaces and key chains. The ancient city, riven by civil strife, escaped destruction by fanatic Bosnia and Iraq with their demonic submarines, bombers, and other dangerous toys, by a hairsbreadth. Self-absorbed, promiscuous, we've brought these evils on ourselves like people who, anticipating the worst from a routine physical, forswear doctors until their symptoms call for drastic measures; as only after the condom-clogged, gaseous, syringe-rich, toxic river overflows and floods the litter-free, segregated streets of the capital will the Rivers Network organize a mass cleanup on Earth Day. The young, lured always by the glitter of cities, find nothing cooler than the hotter— than-ever-before dance-crazes flown in from the clubs of Rio, Barcelona, or Berlin. How was a girl to know that marriage sucks the sap out of sex? And why not make it with the guests, especially if it's just the boost his mercurial career needs to rocket off... How are they to know the sexual spectacles began on their own ravaged ground? And these out-of-towners are so endlessly grateful for a dose of decadence because they "sure don't get pussy like this in Topeka." (The New Age victor is the one who gets the onlooker to come without anything physical happening between them.) "How does he think I know how to get the dry- cleaning-mogul's cock to stiffen, as if a good dis weren't hard to find, like 'you use your tongue like you're trying to remove a spot.'" Her husband, in his white tux, appeared nonchalant, but a second glance revealed a man slaphappy and dazed from one too many Zombies; either way, when the Titania II pulls into port she'll allow whoever has the best offer, captain or mutineer, Delano or Benito Cereno, to take her on the dance floor. Dalliance supplies what she needs for her shopping sprees which "this guy whose wedding ring I like never take off can't get through his head are necessary. He's so dense, like I show up in this designer dress on my 'allowance.' Men have no idea what it costs a girl to be truly glamorous in times like these— and when they land the commission remain clueless as to why they were chosen and not the other guy with the goody-two-shoes type wife." It's shattering to consider that these nerds, for whom watching's the real turn on, sprang from fierce, sturdy stock who in their youth conquered conquerors, brought down swaggering, gallant Hannibal, Pyrrhus, and Antiochus, dyeing the sea red with Punic blood. But the early Romans, the soldier-farmers, knew better than to double think what had to be done, and dug with the tools of the long-gone Sabines, and never neglected to cut the logs to honor mom's firm yet anxious request for firewood as shadows shifted on a far rise, night fell, and man and oxen were the same in their deep desire to lie down. Who is immune from ruin by time? Each generation wearier than the one before; these days no one deigns to have children until they are "professionally secure." And the media waits long and long to warn the idealists born during the baby-boom that the future is also being sabotaged: undone by sluggish sperm; hardened wombs. (after Horace, Odes, Book III, 6)

Coming to Sumer and the tamarisks on the river I Ezra with unsettling love rifled the mud and wattle huts for recent mournings with gold leaves and lapis lazuli beads in the neat braids loosening from the skull Looking through the wattles to the sun I said It has rained some here in this place unless snow falls heavily in the hills to do this The floor was smooth with silt and river weeds hanging gray on the bent reeds spoke saying Everything is even here as you can see Firing the huts I abandoned the unprofitable poor unequal even in the bone to disrespect and casual with certainty watched an eagle wing as I went to king and priest

I. Of Choice Despair is big with friends I love, Hydrogen and burning jews. I give them all the grief I have But I tell them, friends, I choose, I choose, Don’t make me say against my glands Or how the world has treated me. Though gay and modest give offense And people grieve pretentiously, More than I hoped to do, I do And more than I deserve I get; What little I attend, I know And it argues order more than not. My desperate friends, I want to tell Them, you take too delicate offense At the stench of time and man’s own smell, It is only the smell of consequence. II. Of Love People love each other and the light Of love gilds but doesn’t alter, People don’t change one another, can scarcely By taking will and thought add a little Now and then to their own statures Which, praise them, they do, So that here we are in all our sizes Flooded in the impartial daylight sometimes, Spotted sometimes in a light we make ourselves, Human, the beams of attention Of social animals at their work Which is loving; and sometimes all dark. The only correction is By you of you, by me of me. People are worth looking at in this light And if you listen what they are saying is, Love me sun out there whoever you are, Chasing me from bed in the morning, Spooking me all day with shadow, Surprising me whenever you fall; Make me conspicuous as I go here, Spotted by however many beams, Now light, finally dark. I fear There is meant to be a lot of darkness,

On the volatile nights of a winter nature corroborates with magnanimity a Cuban is in training for amusement or amnesia, so often and unfairly assumed as the same, he brings candy to God, he cultivates the vernacular, he fights off cirrhosis with fruit poached in syrup, he conducts business; thus research has shown that The Cuban is resourceful. In the weighty choreographies of a summer nature authorizes already with suspicion a Cuban meets the ocean with offerings and harpoons, so often and unfairly assumed as the same, he finger-counts the casualties, he commits an infraction he slides his hands into his pockets, he avows and commits; thus analysis has shown that The Cuban is inspired. Let’s attend the improbable territory where with pasty mouths a Cuban and The Cuban engage in virile conversation we will learn there by what voyage, by what strange condition by what exchange we fall prey to so much ingenuity.

At last I was convinced that giving in to their thinking represented a huge error in the evolution of my family affairs. Riven with a savage melancholy, not permitted out of the house without two minders—one armed with needle sedative, the other armed with arms—I armed myself with myself and threw off the vulgar superstition and reactionary domination that had up to then poisoned my mental library, imprisoning me, making me believe, with them, that I must have children when I knew that I must not, would not.    And I did not.

For Jack the Ripper walking tours Come ye learned, ye loquacious, ye lost. Walk a pentagram around ego, erudition, experience. Our shuls, mosques, and homes be yours. Our murdered laid bare, our slums still teem, our souls sold. As for us, we marvel as our own effluvia swirls widdershins.