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Two-bloods – Rolando Kattan
| I am a descendent of stillness and sailors still in motion, a brew of saltpeter and blackbird song. In just one bloody wound collide impatience and calm. If I fall silent and words ripen it’s the voice of an olive tree in its quiet seed. I am the hesitation between hideout and sword, the yellow in all the world’s traffic lights. In the future I’ll serve you coffee and worship you—like an icon—in a picture frame. A dos sangres Vengo de una ascendencia de quietud y marineros todavía en movimiento; mezclo el salitre del mar con el canto de un mirlo. En una sola herida de sangre colisiona la serenidad y el desasosiego. Si enmudezco y maduran las palabras es la voz de un olivo en su callada semilla. Soy la incertidumbre entre el escondite o la espada, luz amarillenta en los semáforos del mundo, quiero servir tu café en el futuro o adorarte —como a un icono—en un portarretrato. |
Rolando Kattan
Poetry
blood
blood, blood, irrational blood flowing through my gates
down my thighs useless and hysterical.
what shall we do with this blood
are we in control or are the fates?
here, i shall paint your face with my blood,
draw blessed archaic symbols
on the walls of your arms and legs
remind us of the hunt, the sustenance we need.
i call upon you to taste me
as we smooth the way
for your
dna
to come inside me
when the blood is flowing
and it is safe to welcome these eager explorers,
this advance party of terrestrial observers
who shall all die in their service to the queen.
yes, i shall conspire with you
to send forth another party of your henchmen
your visionaries
inside the road to the sacred city
I shall welcome them passed these holy gates
to meet my ancestors and my future
to become the entire history of our species
to merge, to reemerge
potential bearing potential being potential
and for some while,
for the first time in a quarter of a century,
all this blood shall cease.
POETRY
Homesick: A Plea for Our Planet – Andrea Gibson
In the 5th grade I won the science fair
with a project on climate change
That featured a paper mache ozone layer
with a giant hole, through which a paper mache sun
cancered the skin of a Barbie in a bikini
on a lawn chair, glaciers melting like ice cubes
in her lemonade.
It was 1987 in a town
that could have invented red hats
but the school principal gave me a gold ribbon
and not a single bit of attitude
about my radical political stance,
because neither he nor I knew it was a political stance.
Science had not been fully framed as leftist propaganda.
The president did not have a twitter feed
starving the world of facts.
I spent that summer as I had every summer
before, racing through the forest behind my house
down the path my father called the old logging road
to a meadow thick with raspberry bushes
whose thorns were my very first heroes
because they did nothing with their life but protect
what was sweet.
Sundays I went to church but struggled
to call it prayer if it didn’t leave grass stains
on my knees. Couldn’t call it truth if it didn’t
come with a dare to crawl into the cave
by the creek and stay put until somebody counted
all the way to 100.
As a kid I thought 100 was the biggest number there was.
My mother absolutely blew my mind
the day she said, One hundred and one.
One hundred…AND WHAAAAAT!!!!????
Billionaires never grow out of doing that same math
with years. Can’t conceive of counting past their own lifespans.
Believe the world ends the day they do.
Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those
who have the longest commutes from their heads to their hearts?
Whose greed is the smog that keeps us from seeing
our own nature, and the sweetness we are here to protect?
Do you know sometimes when gathering nectar
bees fall asleep in flowers? Do you know fish
are so sensitive snowflakes sound like fireworks
when they land on the water? Do you know sea otters
hold hands when they sleep so they don’t drift apart?
Do you know whales will follow their injured friends
to shore, often taking their own lives
so to not let a loved one be alone when he dies?
None of this is poetry. It is just the earth
being who she is, in spite of us putting barcodes on the sea.
In spite of us acting like Edison invented daylight.
Dawn presses her blushing face to my window,
asks me if I know the records in my record collection
look like the insides of trees. Yes, I say,
there is nothing you have ever grown that isn’t music.
You were the bamboo in Coltrane’s saxophone reed.
The mulberries that fed the silkworms
that made the slippers for the ballet.
The pine that built the loom that wove the hemp
for Frida Khalo’s canvas. The roses that dyed her paint
hoping her brush could bleed for her body.
Who, more than the earth, has bled for us?
How do we not mold our hearts after the first spruce tree
who raised her hand and begged to be cut
into piano keys so the elephants can keep their tusks?
The earth is the right side of history.
Is the canyon my friend ran to
when no else he knew would echo
his chosen name back to him.
Is the wind that wailed through 1956 Alabama
until the poplar trees carved themselves into Dr King’s pulpit.
Is the volcano that poured the mercury
into the thermometers held under the tongue of Italy,
though she knew our fever was why her canals
were finally running clear. She took our temperature.
Told us we were too hot, even after
we’d spent decades claiming she was not.
Our hands held to her burning forehead,
we insisted she was fine while wildfires
turned redwoods to toothpicks,
readying the teeth of our apocalypse.
She sent a smoke signal all the way from California.
In New York City ash fell from the sky.
Do you know the mountains of California
used to look like they’d been set on fire
because they were so covered in monarch butterflies?
Do you know monarch butterflies migrate 3000 miles
using only the fuel they stored as caterpillars in the cocoon?
We need so much less than we take.
We owe so much more than we give.
Squirrels plant thousands of trees every year
just from forgetting where they left their acorns.
If we aimed to be just half as good
as one of the earth’s mistakes,
we could turn so much around.
Our living would be seed, the future would have roots.
We would cast nothing from the garden of itself.
and we would make the thorns proud.
Poetry
Love is Not All – Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by pain and moaning for release
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
Poetry
Be Kind, Rewind – Neil Silberblatt
That day,
that cloudless Tuesday,
with its Chartres-blue sky,
I could not watch the news.
Instead, I taped the broadcasts
for later watching.
That night,
that quiet night
marred only by the ululation of widows,
I re-wound the tape and watched in reverse
as towers rose from toxic dust
as windows formed from shards of glass and
micrograms of mercury oxide
as confettied papers re-assembled themselves into
binders and file cabinets
and as young men
spread eagled like Icarus
in casual business attire,
ascended on plumes of ash
against the Chartres-blue sky
and reached their offices,
just in time for that all important
10:15 conference call
Poetry
Footprints In Your Heart – Eleanor Roosvelt
Many people will walk in and out of your life,
But only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.
To handle yourself, use your head;
To handle others, use your heart.
Anger is only one letter short of danger.
If someone betrays you once, it is his fault;
If he betrays you twice, it is your fault.
Great minds discuss ideas,
Average minds discuss events,
Small minds discuss people.
He who loses money, loses much;
He who loses a friend, loses much more;
He who loses faith, loses all.
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature,
But beautiful old people are works of art.
Learn from the mistakes of others.
You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
Friends, you and me.
You brought another friend,
And then there were three.
We started our group,
Our circle of friends,
And like that circle –
There is no beginning or end.
Yesterday is history.
Tomorrow is mystery.
Today is a gift.
That’s why it’s called the present.
Poetry
Forgetfulness – Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Poetry
The Long Boat – Stanley Kunitz
When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn’t matter
which way was home;
as if he didn’t know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.
Poetry
Black Momma Math – Kimberly Jae
If a jar of jelly is $2.98
& a loaf of Hawaiian bread is $4
Then how much bail money will I need when I kill everyone in my house
for eating all the bread
and jelly in 5 minutes?
Black Momma Math
If Black Momma has a two 17-year-old Black Boys
What is the probability that they will come home in a body bag in the next 5 years?
If Son A leaves Ferguson at 3pm traveling at 60 miles per hour and Son B leaves Baltimore at 5pm traveling at 50 miles per hour
to drive to Florida,
what time and which morgue
will their bodies be delivered to
when their music and Black Boy Joy inspire a stand your ground tango?
Better yet,
what is the cost of a funeral times 2 if a police officer pulls them over?
If 6 out of 10 people have math anxiety,
Then how many Black women out of 10 have murdered baby anxiety?
Everyone says Black women can’t math
But we have been Black Momma mathing since the beginning of time
They have been long divisioning us since Africa become too valuable to keep as a whole
We’ve been reduced like fractions
Told we’re not equivalent
Compared to and found wanting against each other
even though we have the same common denominator
We get broken down like quadratic equations
Our squared roots have been cut in half
Our ancestral variables are left unknown
We’re always solving for the y
If distance equals rates times time
And the rate of Blacks killed by cops is 9x more than everyone else
Then how distant are we from legalized lynching?
Black women are educated
But being Black Momma provides a more specialized education
Black Momma Philosophy
If I let my son play outside with a toy gun and there are no news camera around to see it,
when the police shoot him
is it murder or self-defense?
We already know which harsh truths everyone ignores until someone not Black validates us
Is it possible that some people are just genetically predisposed to hate?
How free is our will if our fate is decided by our melanin
What is the meaning of Black lives when so many people don’t think we matter?
Black Momma Math
If a jar of jelly is $2.98
& a loaf of Hawaiian bread is $4
But I’m too scared to let my babies go to the grocery store
What is the probability that I am just delaying the inevitable?
Poetry
