517 Social commentaries poems

Awake in the desert to the sound of calling. Must be the mountain, I thought. The violent border, I assumed, though the boundary line between the living and the dead was erased years ago. Awake in the sand, I feared, old shoes decorated with razor wire, a heaven of light on the peaks. Must be time to get up, I assumed. Parked outside, Border Patrol vehicles, I had to choose. Awake to follow immigration shadows vanishing inside American walls, river drownings counted as they cross, Maria Salinas' body dragged out, her mud costume pasted with plastic bottles and crushed beer cans, black water flowing to bless her in her sleep. Must be the roar of illegal death, I decided, a way out of the current, though satellite maps never show the brown veins of the concrete channel. Awake in the arroyo of a mushroom cloud, I choke, 1945 explosion in the sand, eternal radioactive wind, the end of one war mutating the border into another that also requires fatal skills of young men because few dream the atomic bomb gave birth in the Jornado, historic trail behind the mountain realigned, then cut off from El Paso, the town surrounded with barbed wire, the new century kissing car bombs, drug cartels, massacres across the river, hundreds shot in ambushes and neighborhood soccer games that always score. Wake up, I thought, look south to the last cathedral in Juarez before its exploding bricks hurtle this way. Make the sign of the cross, open your eyes to one town, two cities, five centuries of praying in the beautiful dust.

1. One girl of many. Hungry from her birth Half-fed. Half-clothed. Untaught of woman’s worth. In joyless girlhood working for her bread. At each small sorrow wishing she were dead, Yet gay at little pleasures. Sunlight seems Most bright & warm where it most seldom gleams. 2. One girl of many. Tawdry dress and old; And not enough beneath to bar the cold. The little that she had misspent because She had no knowledge of our nature’s laws. Thinking in ignorance that it was best To wear a stylish look, and -- bear the rest. 3. One girl of many. With a human heart. A woman’s too; with nerves that feel the smart Of each new pain as keenly as your own. The old ones, through long use, have softer grown. And yet in spite of use she holds the thought Of might-be joys more than, perhaps, she ought. 4. One girl of many. But the fault is here; Though she to all the others was so near; One difference there was, which made a change. No wrong thing, surely. Consequence most strange! Alike in birth. Alike in life’s rough way. She, through no evil, was more fair than they. 5. So came the offer, “Leave this story cold Where you may drudge and starve till you are old. Come! I will give you rest. And food. And fire. And fair apparel to your heart’s desire; Shelter. Protection. Kindness. Peace & Love. Has your life anything you hold above?” 6. And she had not . In all her daily sight There shone no vestige of the color White . She had seen nothing in her narrow life To make her venerate the title “Wife.” She knew no reason why the thing was wrong; And instinct grows debased in ages long. 7. All things that she had ever yet desired All dreams that her starved girlhood’s heart had fired All that life held of yet unknown delight Shone, to her ignorance, in colors bright. Shone near at hand and sure. If she had known ! But she was ignorant. She was alone. 8. And so she - sinned. I think we call it sin. And found that every step she took therein Made sinning easier and conscience weak. And there was never one who cared to speak A word to guide and warn her. If there were I fear such help were thrown away on her. 9. Only one girl of many. Of the street. In lowest depths. The story grows unmeet For wellbred ears. Sorrow and sin and shame Over and over till the blackened name Sank out of sight without a hand to save. Sin, shame, and sorrow. Sickness, & the grave. 10. Only one girl of many. Tis a need Of man’s existence to repeat the deed. Social necessity. Men cannot live Without what these disgraceful creatures give. Black shame. Dishonor. Misery & Sin. And men find needed health & life therein.

is the six-chambered cylinder, the spinnable heart, how it clicks into place, lonely but strong by design. She understands its negative worth, how it holds in the dark and withstands what is held, how it burns and smells of smoke when left and left and left.

Art what do the art suppressors care about art they jump on bandwagons wallow in press clips & stink up the planet with their pornographic oppression Art what do they care about art they go from being contemporary baby kissers to old time corrupt politicians to self-appointed censorship clerks who won't support art but will support war poverty lung cancer racism colonialism and toxic sludge that's their morality that's their religious conviction that's their protection of the public & contribution to family entertainment what do they care about art

Picture the upturned millipede, dead, and see the streets of Altadena: palm tree rows against the concrete, stiff to the horizon. There have been no birds big enough, we are comforted, to pluck the chitins from before our yards and vanish into the sun like dog-fighting MiGs. War bears litters of similes. Altadena, smog hugs the foothills like mustard gas where our rich peer through their blinds into ravines, Santa Anas sway the mustard plants, yuccas bob, some man—his cigarette, a full gas-can, an itch. We’ve known the orange alert, fires reaching for helicopters like cartoon cats clawing at panicked birds. Yesterday, fire engines and HAZMAT trucks jostled at Alameda and El Molino like beetles eating a four-legged spider. That morning, radios warned of orange. Neighborhood kids watched officers climb in and out an open manhole, consulting the entrails of the great dead millipede. We watched the ground; the sun hotter than all year. The mountains hid Santa Anas, the smog went orange with dusk, the growing shadows of lingering birds.

Good sisters mine, when I shall further from you dwell, Peruse these lines, observe the rules which in the same I tell. So shall you wealth possess, and quietness of mind: And all your friends to see the same, a treble joy shall find. In mornings when you rise, forget not to commend Your selves to God, beseeching him from dangers to defend Your souls and bodies both, your parents and your friends, Your teachers and your governers. So pray you that your ends May be in such a sort as God may pleasèd be: To live to die, to die to live, with him eternally. Then justly do such deeds as are to you assigned: All wanton toys, good sisters now, exile out of your mind. I hope you give no cause whereby I should suspect, But this I know, too many live that would you soon infect. If God do not prevent, or with his grace expell, I cannot speak, or write too much, because I love you well. Your business soon dispatch and listen to no lies, Nor credit every fained tale, that many will devise. For words they are but wind, yet words may hurt you so, As you shall never brook the same, if that you have a foe. God shield you from all such as would by word or bill Procure your shame, or never cease till they have wrought you ill. See that you secrets seal, tread trifles under ground: If to rehearsal oft you come, it will your quiet wound. Of laughter be not much, nor over solemn seem, For then be sure they'll compt you light or proud will you exteem. Be modest in a mean, be gentle unto all: Though cause they give of contrary yet be to wrath no thrall. Refer you all to him, that sits above the skies: Vengeance is his, he will revenge, you need it not devise. And sith that virtue guides, where both of you do dwell: Give thanks to God, and painful be to please your rulers well. For fleeting is a foe, experience hath me taught: The rolling stone doth get no moss your selves have heard full oft. Your business being done, and this my scroll perused, The day will end, and that the night by you be not abused. I something needs must write: take pains to read the same. Henceforth my life as well as pen shall your examples frame. Your Masters gone to bed, your Mistresses at rest, Their daughters all with haste about to get themselves undrest. See that their plate be safe, and that no spoon do lack, See doors and windows bolted fast for fear of any wrack. Then help if need there be, to do some household thing: If not, to bed, referring you unto the heavenly King. Forgetting not to pray as I before you taught, And giving thanks for all that he hath ever for you wrought. Good Sisters, when you pray, let me remembered be: So will I you, and thus I cease, till I your selves do see.

Every family that lived in our court had an American truck with a union sticker on the back and as a kid I admired them the way I thought our soldiers must have admired Patton and Sherman tanks. You once told me that the Russians couldn’t take us, not with towns like ours full of iron, full of workers tempered by the fires of foundries and mills. It wasn’t the Russians that came; it was the contract, the strike, the rounds of layoffs that blistered until your number was called. I still remember you loading up to leave for the last time, the union sticker scraped off with a putty knife, the end of the white tarp draped over your truck bed flapping as you drove away.

Past the congested interstate, past the long lines outside the Dorothy Day Center, past the cheering bleachers, the steam rising from the coach’s face, the fathers straining in prayer, past the rusting letters on the marquee, the dim lights along Main, the couples who will fuck during the movie & the couples who won’t, past the frozen orchard, past the defaced statue of a saint, a dog chews thin the leather cord around his neck. The opposite of hunger is not satisfaction, it is birth. It is what makes a man chisel a face into stone. It is what drives the body to lie in the fresh snow. It is what quiets the world when she pulls you in close. It is the winning pass, the crowd too busy counting down to notice. The world puts its mouth on you & you don’t say a thing. The world digs a hole in your yard & it’s up to you to fill it, up to you to find something useful to do with your sadness. Strange, the yellow beetle, dried between the pages of the dictionary, staining the page with its flattened body — its outline, a dirty halo circling the word pleased— please, you’ve circled the same two blocks in search of a place to park, circled the yard howling a name that won’t respond, but you still think you know enough to call that enough? The boat smacks against the dock it’s tied to. Your mother fixes your father’s tie before closing the casket. Everyone you loved refused to die in this town before they died in this town. The woman beside you on the plane wants to know where you’re going.

Stuck on the fridge, our favorite pin-up girl is anorexic. On the radio we have a riff of Muzak sax, and on the mind a self-help book. We sprawl all evening, all alone, in the unraised ranch; all day the company we kept kept on incorporating. As for the world of poverty, we did our best, thanks to a fund of Christian feeling and mementos from Amelia, the foster child, who has the rags and seven photogenic sisters we prefer in someone to be saved. She's proof Americans have got a heart to go with all that happy acumen you read about. We're known to love a million little prettinesses, decency, and ribbons on the cockapoo. (But who will study alphabets for hands? Who gives a damn what patience goes into a good wheelchair? Who lugs the rice from its umpteen stores to the ends of the earth, to even one dead-end? Not we.) Our constitutional pursuit is happiness, i.e. somebody nice, and not too fat, we can have for our personal friend.

Coinage of the not-yet-wholly- hardened custodians of public health, as health is roughly measured in the rougher parts of Dearborn. Meaning, how many parents, when things get bad, are wearing what they’ve slept in when they come to pick up the kids at school. The best of talk, said someone once, is shop talk: we can go to it as to a well. But manifolds and steering racks are going the way of the wells—offshore— so the-nifty-thing-you-do- with-the-wrench-when-the-foreman- has-sped-the-line-up has become a ghastly shorthand for despair among the people you are paid to help. Despair, sometimes, of helping. In the winter dawn a decade and a half ago, we’d gather around the school bus stop—the unshaved fathers, mothers, dogs, the siblings in their snowsuits—so the children bound for Johnson Elementary might have a proper sending-off. The privileged of the earth, in our case: words and stars and molecules were all our care, a makeshift village blessed with time and purpose. And a school bus stop, to make it seem like life. By far my favorites were the Russian mathematicians: bathrobes hanging below their parkas, cigarettes scattering ash, their little ones for the moment quite forgotten, they would cover the walls of the shelter with what to most of us was Greek but was no doubt of urgent consequence for quantum fields. So filled with joy: their permanent markers on the brick. And then the bus, and then the children off without us and our little human pretext gone. Fragile the minutes. Fragile the line between wonder and woe. The poet when he wrote about our parents in the garden gave them love and rest and mindfulness. But first he gave them honest work.