506 History and politics poems

for Mark Strand La Barraca Blues Suite/i. Beneath canopies of green, unionists marched doggedly outside The Embassy. Their din was no match for light lancing through leaves of madrone trees lining the Paseo then flashing off glossy black Maybachs skidding round a plaza like a monarch fleeing the paparazzi. Your voice skipped and paused like a pencil. Layers of morning pastries flaked gingerly then fell, soft as vowels, on a china plate. One learns to cherish the wizened reserve of old world manners, two blotched hands making wings of a daily paper beside us between sips of café con leche, a demeanor in short gentle as grand edifaces along this boulevard. Yet Guernica is down the street, and some windshields wear a sinister face, sometimes two. Think Goya. Just south of here, on the lower slopes of the Sierras, fields of olive groves braid the land like a Moorish head, but those sultans were kicked out long ago. In the lobby of the Hotel Urban, I wait for a cab, my obedient rolling bag like a pet beside me. I have loved again another city but Madrid is yours: her caped olés, her bullish flag, her glass pavilions and outdoor tables like a festival of unbroken laughter, our dark harbors, finding level. ii. Salobreña That stretch of mountains features white windmill blades whose slow turns are rifles aiming, for I cannot help but think of Lorca's killing between here and the village Alfaçar, and the firing squad's gun pops are that Flamencan dancer's heel stomps. I bring back, too, her brisk hand claps and the cantor's Andalusian moans like dried sticks, or bones crumbling in his throat. Only souvenir shops and steep winding streets accrete in this region's stacked brochures.   Her dress spills across the restaurant's floor like a red shadow, darker than billboards of black bulls high above roadways, motionless but seeming to gallop like Franco's brigades. All seeing is an act of war. Tanks and artillery or Spanish castles and mosques? I choose to lose, and beneath a watercolorist's sky study Didi's splendor, nude against the unruffled backdrop of the Alboran Sea whose waves match my sighs and bomb this beach, launching sprays of white duds. iii. Córdoba, Mezquita Even if he'd pulled over to study Andalusia's road signs, after one thousand and one nights, he still could not make out its calligraphic script, its vertical lines, its dots, marks like smoke stilled from incense, its curled sand soft Arabic, but this city's voice has coffins and carnations, and its hoarse singing shoots through him like twelve bars of earthen road that lengthens into a labyrinth of knowing blood beneath black skin. More echoes: the Alhambra sent him back to the seraglio of his youth where a Moorish guard stood in a museum, unfazed by a harem's rising laughter behind palace doors. Here are pillars and banded arches to once again imagine the body passing through like a key into infinity. Was this the answer to his ghetto past? But why travel so far? Since a child, even in sleep, he voyaged and broke free, tossing dice in dreams, once below deck on a caravel next to grains of paradise. He's collecting a thousand faces. He's moving beneath eyelids, turning time into flesh. Don't judge him. The courtyard's orange trees where once he washed like a morisco are teaching his tongue the craft.

I am Queen and I shall do my utmost to fulfil my duty towards my country. Duty is a slapped mouth, sewn shut with cat-gut. To my dear, loyal subjects who are assembled to show their good humour and excessive loyalty. Apes, hyenas, jackdaws: how they screech and caw. How proud I felt to be the Queen of such a Nation, the Crown being placed on my head, so gently. But such a weight! Monstrous as a beached whale. It was, I remember, a most beautiful, impressive moment. My robes draped on the chair beautifully. White body full of blood, bruises that bleed. Nothing was done without his loving advice and help, darling Albert was the other part of me. FIlled withlife after life after life after life after life. The only ray of comfort I get for a moment is in the firm conviction and certainty. I remember the chloroform. So blissfully empty of voices. of his nearness, his undying love and of our eternal reunion. Impatiently I wait and I do my damn duty.

All hail the crumbling stone monument to the Battle of Bad Axe, the wooden helve long rotted and burned, the short walk to the river, where we can bathe in its brown, where a steamboat ghost huffs out a stream of bullets. We are invulnerable to their spectral lead, descendants of fur traders (beaver, ermine, skunk). Our lungs are clean and pink. Let’s visit the saw shop, the greenhouse with bluff views, the pines and stacks of firewood, the Blackhawk general store, named for the warrior who waved a chalky, misunderstood flag and eluded capture for weeks. In winter, eagles dive here, gathering lift when the wind hits the bluffs: all hail the migrating raptor, its piercing talon and yellow cere.

It was a matter of wearing gloves well while lunching, while conquering Dubrovnik; of, no one would care how, evading Hell. Diverse employments made gentlemen tick: Christmas turkeys; circulating trophies; pedestal stacked upon pedestal. Today silence has come to see what no one sees, it’s always grim at the start of the play. Fellows, who wait à propos their intros clawing at the panels, such shrill tigers, thrive unthreading the hems of the heroes. Friends of our late friend are minor-leaguers never to be called up but good as types, people who will hook bras to the flagpole, bake chocolate for a gray stranger  ...    She wipes away red records of the stocks you stole  ... Yesterday, books were thrown from the third floor, out the window, they sank in pairs like shoes, and I watch violet swords on a white shore, blade-tip laid across blade-tip, where it snows.

In memory of my parents People whose lives have been shaped by history—and it is always tragic— do not want to talk about it, would rather dance, give parties on thrift-shop china. You feel wonderful in their homes, two leaky rooms, nests they stowed inside their hearts on the road into exile. They know how to fix potato peelings and apple cores so you smack your lips. The words start over again hold no terror for them. Obediently they rise and go with only a rucksack or tote bag. If they weep, it’s when you’re not looking. To tame their nightmares, they choose the most dazzling occupations, swallow the flames in the sunset sky, jump through burning hoops in their elegant tiger suits. Cover your eyes: there’s one walking on a thread thirty feet above us— shivering points of light leap across her body, and she works without a net.

Vivas to those who have fail'd! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known! —Walt Whitman I. The Red Flag The newspapers said the strikers would hoist the red flag of anarchy over the silk mills of Paterson. At the strike meeting, a dyers' helper from Naples rose as if from the steam of his labor, lifted up  his hand and said here is the red flag: brightly stained with dye for the silk of bow ties and scarves, the skin and fingernails boiled away for six dollars a week in the dye house. He sat down without another word, sank back into the fumes, name and face rubbed off by oblivion's thumb like a Roman coin from the earth of his birthplace dug up after a thousand years, as the strikers shouted the only praise he would ever hear. II. The River Floods the Avenue He was the other Valentino, not the romantic sheik and bullfighter of silent movie palaces who died too young, but the Valentino standing on his stoop to watch detectives hired by the company bully strikebreakers onto a trolley and a chorus of strikers bellowing the banned word scab. He was not a striker or a scab, but the bullet fired to scatter the crowd pulled the cork in the wine barrel of Valentino's back. His body, pale as the wings of a moth, lay beside his big-bellied wife. Two white-veiled horses pulled the carriage to the cemetery. Twenty thousand strikers walked behind the hearse, flooding the avenue like the river that lit up the mills, surging around the tombstones.Blood for blood, cried Tresca: at this signal, thousands of hands dropped red carnations and ribbons into the grave, till the coffin evaporated in a red sea. III. The Insects in the Soup Reed was a Harvard man. He wrote for the New York magazines. Big Bill, the organizer, fixed his good eye on Reed and told him of the strike. He stood on a tenement porch across from the mill to escape the rain and listen to the weavers. The bluecoats told him to move on. The Harvard man asked for a name to go with the number on the badge, and the cops tried to unscrew his arms from their sockets. When the judge asked his business, Reed said:Poet. The judge said:Twenty days in the county jail. Reed was a Harvard man. He taught the strikers Harvard songs, the tunes to sing with rebel words at the gates of the mill. The strikers taught him how to spot the insects in the soup, speaking in tongues the gospel of One Big Union and the eight-hour day, cramming the jail till the weary jailers had to unlock the doors. Reed would write: There's war in Paterson. After it was over, he rode with Pancho Villa. IV. The Little Agitator The cops on horseback charged into the picket line. The weavers raised their hands across their faces, hands that knew the loom as their fathers' hands knew the loom, and the billy clubs broke their fingers. Hannah was seventeen, the captain of the picket line, the Joan of Arc of the Silk Strike. The prosecutor called her a little agitator. Shame, said the judge; if she picketed again, he would ship her to the State Home for Girls in Trenton. Hannah left the courthouse to picket the mill. She chased a strikebreaker down the street, yelling in Yidish the word for shame. Back in court, she hissed at the judge's sentence of another striker. Hannah got twenty days in jail for hissing. She sang all the way to jail. After the strike came the blacklist, the counter at her husband's candy store, the words for shame. V. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed Strikers without shoes lose strikes. Twenty years after the weavers and dyers' helpers returned hollow-eyed to the loom and the steam, Mazziotti led the other silk mill workers marching down the avenue in Paterson, singing the old union songs for five cents more an hour. Once again the nightsticks cracked cheekbones like teacups. Mazziotti pressed both hands to his head, squeezing red ribbons from his scalp. There would be no buffalo nickel for an hour's work at the mill, for the silk of bow ties and scarves. Skull remembered wood. The brain thrown against the wall of the skull remembered too: the Sons of Italy, the Workmen's Circle, Local 152, Industrial Workers of the World, one-eyed Big Bill and Flynn the Rebel Girl speaking in tongues to thousands the prophecy of an eight-hour day. Mazziotti's son would become a doctor, his daughter a poet. Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river.

I was the fourth ship. Behind Ni ñ a, Pinta, Santa Mar í a, Lost at sea while watching a seagull, Following the wind and sunset skies, While the others set their charts. I was the fourth ship. Breathing in salt and flying with clouds, Sailing moonbreezes and starvision nights, Rolling into the wave and savoring its lull, While the others pointed their prows. I was the fourth ship. Playfully in love with the sea, Eternally entwined with the sky, Forever vowed to my voyage, While the others shouted "Land."

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What’s the point of senators making laws now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader. He’s even got a scroll to give him, loaded with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say? Because the barbarians are coming today and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking. Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come. And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.

In the early contact period, New England Indian wampum consisted of small tubular-shaped shells drilled and strung as beads. — Alfred A. Cave The breaking of clouds begins with seizure. A man grabs another, reasons ransom. A murder averted in the thing’s scheme. A cape’s shell transformed, more than one supposed. What stands behind this? Enemy or friend? (Yes, they can be both. Don’t you think I know?) List: Dutch. Indian. Pequot. Puritan. List: Then. War. Event. Now. History. List. The shell buys glories of iron and pelt. Wampum is dismissed. Joke. Sneer. Currency of the disappeared whose children live still. List: Blessing. Curse. Wife. Slave. Savior. Savage. The shells make their noise. The robbed graves cradle. He who brings food to the starving gets cooked.

A siren sang, and Europe turned away From the high castle and the shepherd’s crook. Three caravels went sailing to Cathay On the strange ocean, and the captains shook Their banners out across the Mexique Bay. And in our early days we did the same. Remembering our fathers in their wreck We crossed the sea from Palos where they came And saw, enormous to the little deck, A shore in silence waiting for a name. The treasures of Cathay were never found. In this America, this wilderness Where the axe echoes with a lonely sound, The generations labor to possess And grave by grave we civilize the ground.