Landing Page

Before I start this poem, I’d like to ask you to join me in a moment
of silence in honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon last September 11th.

I would also like to ask you to offer up a moment of silence for all
of those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes, for the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who
have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces over decades of
occupation.

Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly
children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem, two months of silence for the Blacks under
Apartheid in South Africa, where homeland security made them aliens in their own country

Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin and the survivors went on as if alive.

A year of silence for the millions of dead in Viet Nam—a people, not a
war—for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives’ bones buried in it, their babies born of it.

A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of a
secret war … ssssshhhhh …. Say nothing … we don’t want them to
learn that they are dead.

Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia, whose
names, like the corpses they once represented, have piled up and
slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem,
An hour of silence for El Salvador…
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua…
Two days of silence for the Guetmaltecos…
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, the west … 100 years of silence …

For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness …

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut

A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same

And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be.
Not like it always has been

Because this is not a 9-1-1 poem
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem

This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written

And if this is a 9/11 poem, then
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York, 1971.

This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children

Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit
If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful people have gathered

You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence
Take it.
But take it all
Don’ t cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime.

But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.

— Emmanuel Ortiz 9.11.02 

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
Beside an old rusted machine,
In the same spot, neither lower down,
Nor higher up,
He will join up with me some day.
Now he’s gone off with his cold nose,
Hairy coat and bad education.
And I, materialist that I am,
Who do not believe in the celestial
Promised Land for any human
For this dog or for any dog,
I do believe in heaven, yes, I believe
In a heaven where I shall not enter,
But he will be waiting for me
Waving his fan-shaped tail
So that I shall have friends when I arrive.

Humans – hear me!
I speak for the glacier beings:
ice and gravel, crevasse, snowbridge,
rushing water.

Watch how we move. May watching bring you peace.
Think of the making of mountains, gorges,
ponds, rivers without end.
That is how we move.
Bonded together, turning over time,
great and lasting forms.

Our glacier ways are the old ways.
We are kin to the dew on the grass, the icicles
hanging from your gutters, the irrigation for your
farmlands, the bubbles in your fountains.
Crystal and vapor are beautiful ways
we touch the face of the earth.

Two-legged beings, frantic and sad ones,
follow my path downstream from the mountains,
cascade and river current, flowing through marshes
and out to sea. Taking that journey over and over
I pass by you as cloud and rain and snow.
You are the frozen ones, believing yourselves
apart from each other and other life forms.

With your hearts, listen for the voices
deep inside the glacier. They will teach you songs of
the power of melting.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was 
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars 
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
– Jack Gilbert

Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads,
a woman who feels too much,
a woman who writes…
Don’t fall in love with an educated, magical, delusional, crazy woman.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who thinks,
who knows what she knows
and also knows how to fly;
a woman sure of herself.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who
laughs or cries making love,
knows how to turn her spirit into flesh;
let alone one that loves poetry (these are the most dangerous),
or spends half an hour contemplating a painting
and isn’t able to live without music.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who is interested
in politics and is rebellious and
feels a huge horror from injustice.
One who does not like to watch television at all
Or a woman who is beautiful
no matter the features of her face or her body.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who is intense,
entertaining, lucid and irreverent.
Don’t wish to fall in love with a woman like that.
Because when you fall in love
with a woman like that,
whether she stays with you or not,
whether she loves you or not,
from a woman like that, you never come back.

my brain and
heart divorced
a decade ago
over who was
to blame about
how big of a mess
I have become
eventually,
they couldn’t be
in the same room
with each other

now my head and heart
share custody of me
I stay with my brain
during the week
and my heart
gets me on weekends
they never speak to one another
– instead, they give me
the same note to pass
to each other every week
and the notes they
send to one another always
say the same thing:
“This is all your fault”

on Sundays
my heart complains
about how my
head has let me down
in the past
and on Wednesday
my head lists all
of the times my
heart has screwed
things up for me
in the future
they blame each
other for the
state of my life
there’s been a lot
of yelling – and crying
so,
lately, I’ve been
spending a lot of
time with my gut
who serves as my
unofficial therapist

most nights, I sneak out of the
window in my ribcage
and slide down my spine
and collapse on my
gut’s plush leather chair
that’s always open for me
~ and I just sit sit sit sit
until the sun comes up

last evening,
my gut asked me
if I was having a hard
time being caught
between my heart
and my head
I nodded
I said I didn’t know
if I could live with
either of them anymore
“my heart is always sad about
something that happened yesterday
while my head is always worried
about something that may happen tomorrow,”
I lamented

my gut squeezed my hand
“I just can’t live with
my mistakes of the past
or my anxiety about the future,”
I sighed
my gut smiled and said:
“in that case,
you should
go stay with your
lungs for a while,”
I was confused