More jails than clinics! More brothels than schools!
More children outside than inside first grade
Being consumed like tortillas and beans
In the stomachs of global dinosaurs!
The consumed children! The consumed children!
With futures welded to the rusted clocks
Of the feudal lords and their blackboard boys
From Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Brown!
Now The Northern Hordes raid with computers
Which make their own clones of the perfect slaves!
Now The Northern Hordes raid with their checkbooks
And corporations mortgage our harvests!
The consumed children and their small footprints
In melting asphalt six hundred miles long
Bearing petitions to the capital
Where the Mafia Boss gave them red balloons!
Our blood for balloons! Our tears for their lies!
Our howls and our screams for their polished words!
Our sticks and our teeth against their paid gangs
Trained by The Northern Advisers of Death!
Trained to use terror with official seals
Terror with white gloves and smiling faces!
Terror to suck out our precious fuel
From the nipples which never touched our lips!
Terror to foreclose on our farms and homes
Where our ancestors lived for millenniums!
Terror tumbling us like our conifers
And the dice they rolled to bet on our fate!
We tumbled to their overgrown cities
And covered our heads with tin and cardboard
Among warehouses of steel and cement
Bursting with exports they looted from us!
And now every night we are terrified
To see our faces in our hollow plates
So we seek mercy under our pillows
And dream of jasmines dancing on our hills!
PART III.
O how sweet they smell in their white glory
Like the sun-baked juice of our coconuts!
Perhaps even we knew the purest joy
Which tingled our skin and made us worship!
Perhaps even we climbed to the summits
To receive the plans to build pyramids
We the small people with the funny hats
Wearing bright colors and even laughing!
We the small people with the curved shoulders
Sagging like our roofs and our weary cheeks
Hiding hopelessly from the gravity
Which our fellow men quadrupled for us!
We the small people who honored the earth
And preserved this land since the last ice age
This wealthiest land where today we earn
A penny to pick a pound of cotton!
From Pichucalco to Ocosingo
And from Reforma to Ostuacan
We are raped by day we are raped by night
And left on dirt roads in the mud of shame!
Yet once we had slept by the volcanoes
And their black lava prepared our gardens!
The sun itself bowed to our calendars
The wind itself was born in our highlands!
“Hey Mister, Mister, you want my sister?
For twenty dollars have her for the night!”
We were skywatchers before Egyptians
And governed by laws even before Greeks!
Our nobles were priests and scribes and artists
Who dwelled in our sky as gods when they died!
We used zero first and grew our Maize
When the Northerners were only hunters!
“Hey Mister, Mister, a step at a time,
A step at a time to approach our grief!
A drop at a time to drink our suffering!
An inch at a time to dig in our chests!”
A penny to pick a pound of cotton!
A dollar to sell a box of Chiclets!
A million gestures of squandered kindness!
A dawn held hostage to endless nightmares!
He said it is time to force the new dawn
Into the dungeons where our lives are trapped!
He said it is time to build our temples
On the foundations of their crushed barracks!
He said it is time now to resurrect
Our dignity and wash it with perfume!
He said it is time for justice to roar
Like the volcanoes which had slept with us!
March, 2000
Ontario, CA
I dedicate this page to the great Alfred Schnittke, who gave me much strength when I was in great need. May the Lord God bless him forever.
"And how much I want to be carried away by play,
to have a conversation, to speak the truth,
to blow my depression to the mist, the devil and to hell,
to take someone by the hand and say to him 'Be kind --
we're on the same road.' "
O.E.Mandelstam
"On wind he walks, and in wind
he knows himself. There is no ceiling for the wind,
no home for the wind. Wind is the compass
of the stranger's North.
He says: I am from there, I am from here,
but I am neither there nor here.
I have two names which meet and part...
I have two languages, but I have long forgotten
which is the language of my dreams."
"I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanise ...but now I think that poetry changes only the poet."
Mahmoud Derwish
(Palestinian poet 1942-2008)
Alfred Schnittke: the uneven Russian genius
"His music is highly emotional like older music, but emotional in a way that reflects 20th Century experience. Considering the stifling repression in the Soviet Union, and the uncertainty and anxiety experienced everywhere during the post-war era, it should not be surprising to discover that “terror, threats, dread, mourning… are part and parcel of the music” of this great composer."
