109 Social justice poems

Into a crock of gold he’d set some weeds, Behold swart devils in the sunniest weather; He would lump the saint and the courtesan together, Most miserably jangling all the creeds. The prurient multitude heard he was mad, Yet nosed his books for some pornography. The censors doubted his virginity, And secretly conned the works that they forbade. Reporters found this dangerous oddity In rusty pantaloons, mowing the green, And wondered how so dull a wretch could have seen A naked Venus disturbing an alien sea. He watched their backs receding down the street, Raked up the grass, and suddenly had a vision Of how Venus, bathing, saw with amused derision Behind the bushes peeping satyrs’ feet.

Here's how we were counted: firstborn, nay-sayers, veterans, slow-payers, seditionists, convicts, half-breeds, has-beens, the nearly defined dead, all the disenfranchised live. Once everybody had a place among the nameless. Now we can't afford to be anonymous. Consider, they said, the poor, the misfit—consider the woman figuring herself per cent. Consider the P.A. system making a point so intimate I petition not to be anybody's good guess or estimate. I ask to be one: maybe widow-to-be watching the sun diminish brick by brick along the jail wall and also that green pear on its drunken roll out of the executioner's lunch basket. At 12:01, 02, in the cocked chamber of the digital clock the newsman said:There'll be less work in the new century.

There is the one who turns A spoon over like a letter, Reading the teeth-marks Older than his own; The one who strikes a match, Its light flowering In his eyes, The smoke in his throat; The one who opens the mouth Of a dog to listen To the sea, white-tipped And blind, feel its way to shore. At night They walk in the streets, The dust skirting their legs Raw with lice And the wind funneled Through a doorway Where someone might pray For a loaf of good luck. * Somewhere the old follow Their canes down A street where the front Pages of a newspaper Scuttle faceless And the three-legged dog hops home. A door is locked twice And flies ladder a scale of fish. Somewhere a window yellows From a lantern. A child With fever, swabbed in oils And mint, his face Spotted like an egg, His cry no different Than the cry That shakes the trees lean. A candle is lit for the dead Two worlds ahead of us all.

When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!" So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep. There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said, "Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair." And so he was quiet, & that very night, As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight! That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack, Were all of them locked up in coffins of black; And by came an Angel who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins & set them all free; Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run, And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind. And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father & never want joy. And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark And got with our bags & our brushes to work. Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm; So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Acts of love have material effects. For a woman tending the sacred fire, these include the risk of becoming an extinguisher of flames essential to civic life. It is a burden to put out what others hold as central to faith in coherence. Acts of faith have material effects — a Vestal Virgin touched by encounter must be buried alive, a beautiful metaphor for shame itself, which squirms even under all that dirt. Thus, the dead learn too late that devotion should be unidirectional, a straight line from here to suffocation. Love must not bleed at the edges, must not meet others in the banal spaces of civic life. It is a burden to personify. If Vesta’s hearth is the site of the sacred, its material effects are destruction: burning, consumption, constant hunger for more wood. Acts of destruction have fantasmatic effects. For a body surviving encounter, these include civic life, shame; the risk of being a proxy — tender of the hearth belonging to the public, by way of the goddess, who embodies a dream of faith in coherence. Material effects extinguish themselves, eventually, as when a woman touched in the correct way undoes the burden of love and puts out, taking the goddamn city in and under.

Here the readers gather to watch the books die. They die suddenly, as if thrown from an airplane, or from spontaneous cardiac arrest. They live, and then suddenly they die, and the reader who watches this is at the moment of the books' death bombarded with images documented through the smiling lipstick face of a journalist who has shown up to report on the death of the books. The milk was poisoned and forty-two babies died, she laughs, as she fondles the ashes of the dead books. And the death of forty-two babies is equal in value to the death of this book which is equal in value to the ninety-year old woman who shot herself while the sheriff waited at her door with an eviction notice which is equal in value to the collapsing of the global economy which is equal to the military in country XYZ seizing the land of the semi-nomadic hunters and cultivators of crops who have lived in the local rain forest for thousands of years. The reader opens a dead book and finds an infinite amount of burnt ash between the bindings, and when the ash blows in the wind the lipstick says that every death in the world is equal to every other death in the world which is equal to every birth in the world which is equal to every act of dismemberment which is equal to the death of a jungle which is equal to the collapse of the global economy; and hey look there’s another lady falling out of a window; she looks about equal to the poet hurled out of his country for words he wrote but which did not belong to him and whose death is about equal to the girl who was shot on the bus on her way to school this morning which is just about the same as the bearded man whose head was shoved into a sac while water was dumped over it and he died for an instant and came back to life and talked and talked and that’s about equal to the steroid illegally injected into the arm of a beautiful man who makes forty million dollars a year for injecting his arms with steroids so he can more skillfully wave a wooden stick at a ball, and in the ash we see the truest democracy there ever was: hey look it’s a little baby found in a dumpster how equal you are says the smiling lipstick to the civilized nation whose citizens walk the flooded streets looking for their homes, and in the ashes of the dead book the dead streets are equal to the eating disorders of movie stars which are equal to the dead soldiers who are equal to the homeruns which are equal to the bomb dropped by country ABC over weddings in the village of country XYZ which is equal to the earth swallowing up and devouring all of its foreigners which is just about equal to the decline in literacy in the most educated nation in the planet. There is no end to this book. There are no paragraph breaks to interrupt the smiling lipstick that goes on and on in one string of ashy words about how the declaration of peace is equal to the resumption of war and how the bodies that fall are equal to the birds that ascend and how the bomb in the Eiffel Tower is equal to the rising cost of natural gas, and the murmurs of the voices in the mud are equal to the murmurs of the expensive suits falling out of buildings and these are equal to the silence that kills with one breath and coddles life with another.

Brutal to give the prisoner a window— a blue sky glimpse— as if an afterlife existed. Brutal for you to parade in a body in the same room where I dream you.

We lived in the lucky world— not the far place where flies sipped at eye corners of children too weak to cry. A camera showed that world to us on posters. But we were children. We wanted most to not be those others, with their terrible bones. We spoke of them wide-eyed, with what we thought was tenderness. But our words came in a different register, as if to speak of such betrayal by the grown world could bring a harm of great immensity upon us too. We got to choose from the cupboard. We gave what we hated—beets, peas, mushrooms. Our dreams were not of rice. The moon laid light on our bicycles propped against the porch. Sycamores became our giants standing guard; the overgrown shrub, our fort. We thought we understood what was required. Even crouched beneath our desks during drill, we said one prayer for the fear, one for recess. McClellan Air Force Base sent forth big-bellied planes that rattled the windows of our houses. Evenings, we took to the streets shrieking with joy, rode madly fast around the block. We collapsed on the lawn breathless, the earth cool beneath us & pounding hard, as if it had one great heart. As if it was ours.

My first day leading the prison writing workshop: Carlos complimented my choosing the chair nearest the door. I read a poem by Whitman that once sent me hitchhiking and Carlos stood up, asked to read a section from his four hundred-page work-in-progress, a poem that turns on his first finding Neruda's "One Year Walk"; he said it lit up the night like a perfect crime, so I left everything — I had no choice—walked three thousand miles to the Pacific . From memory he recited a passage in which his father left the family a small fortune, all counterfeit: though I doubted the facts, I can still see that worn briefcase, almost-perfect hundreds stacked neatly in shrink-wrapped packs. I was young, it took me two weeks to accept that I could teach this lifer nothing. World of concrete floors and everlasting light: he was grateful to God who gave him a blazing mind not granted to anyone living or dead , and wouldn't have changed a word anyway.

Once I have the freedom to say my tongue will lose its power. Since my poems strive to break the walls that cut off people’s voices, they become drills and hammers. But I will be silenced. The starred tie around my neck at any moment can tighten into a cobra. How can I speak about coffee and flowers?