I have contemplated suicide only twice -- or perhaps 3 times. I have resolved not to be a suicide because I love life which I know, better than death, which I don't, and which I suspect to be the ultimate bore.
Musing on the way that anti-abortion arguments turn people into vessels for the production of babies, she asks: "What was the point of making another person, when the woman herself -- a person who already existed -- counts for so little?"
slubber + the British dialectal term gullion (“wretch”).
slubberdegullion (plural slubberdegullions)
from Wiktionary
Someone will need to forgive me for being
who I am, for sneaking back to my blue chair
by the window, where for the last three hundred and seventy days
I have learned that to be alone is what is good for me. I am pretending
as if I really belong with those who want to return to this world
with open arms, even though it has done to us
what it has done. I wish I could love like that,
instead of wanting to turn my back on it all,
as if life in the world were a marriage
assumed too young and necessarily left behind.
Try as I might I will never become
one of the world’s faithful ones.
My naked face and your naked face,
maskless. A cold March dawn,
harsh sunlight, impersonal and honest,
mindless like the light from a surgeon’s lamp
worn on the forehead as you peer down
into the wound. Nothing in this new life
is asked of me except to remember how small I am.
2
Sometimes the world won’t let itself
be sung. Can’t become a poem. Sometimes
we are sane, but sanity alone is not enough.
Warm moonlight and wind. I am sitting here,
simply breathing because there is no other way
to be with those who no longer can.
I don’t know what to say about it all,
but if you do please show me how to be you.
In the last play I saw, fourteen months ago,
before there were no more plays,
they had made a sea of the stage. Songs were chanted
on its shore. Lives lived. People pretended to die
and a ship sailed into the night. A moon. One star.
Afterward, applause. Then began that long silence
which it is now time for me to admit I have loved
beyond any reason or defense. Who among us
has not seen that star to the left
of the lockdown moon, shining
as the ship sets sail?
"Paraphrasing an American saying, she used to argue that patriotism is like a penis: irrespective of its size, it's not a great idea to go waving it around in public"
Because you suffocated your beauty in fat.
Because you made of our adoration, mockery.
Because you were the predator male, without remorse.
Because you were the greatest of our actors, and you threw away greatness like trash.
Because you could not take seriously what others took as their lives.
Because in this you made mockery of our lives.
Because you died encased in fat
And even then, you’d lived too long.
Because you loathed yourself, and made of yourself a loathsome person.
Because the wheelchair paraplegic of The Men was made to suffocate in the fat of the bloated Kurtz.
Because your love was carelessly sown, debris tossed from a speeding vehicle.
And because you loved both men and women, except not enough.
Because the slow suicide of self-disgust is horrible to us, and fascinating as the collapse of tragedy into farce is fascinating and the monstrousness of festered beauty.
Because you lured a girl of 15 to deceive her parents on a wintry-dark December school day, 1953.
Because you lured this girl to lie about where she was going, what she was doing, in the most reckless act of her young life.
Because you lured this girl to take a Greyhound bus from Williamsville,
New York to downtown Buffalo, New York, alone in the wintry dusk, as she
had not ever been alone in her previous life.
Because you lured this girl shivering, daring to step onto the bus in
front of Williamsville High School at 4:55 pm to be taken 12 miles to
the small shabby second-run Main Street Cinema for a 6 pm showing of The Wild One – a place that would’ve been forbidden, if the girl’s parents had known.
What might have happened! – by chance, did not happen.
Because inside the Main Street Cinema were rows of seats near-empty in the dark, commingled smells of stale popcorn and cigarette smoke – (for this was an era when there was “smoking in the loge”), and on the screen the astonishing magnified figure of “Johnny” in black leather jacket, opaque dark sunglasses, on his motorcycle exuding the sulky authority of the young predator male.
Because when asked what you were rebelling against you said with wonderful disdain, What’ve you got?
Because that was our answer too, that we had not such words to utter.
Because as Johnny you took us on the outlaw motorcycle, we clung to your waist like the sleep of children.
Because as Johnny you were the face of danger, and you were unrepentant.
Because as Johnny you could not say Thank you.
Because as Johnny you abandoned us in the end.
Because on that motorcycle you grew smaller and smaller on the road out of the small town, and vanishing.
Because you have vanished. Because in plain sight you vanished.
Because the recklessness of adolescence is such elation, the heart is filled to bursting.
Because recklessness is the happy quotient of desperation, and
contiguous with shame, and yet it is neither of these, and greater than
the sum of these.
Because the girl will recall through her life how you entered her life
like sunlight illuminating a landscape wrongly believed to be denuded of
beauty.
Because there is a savage delight in loss, and in the finality of loss.
Because at age 23 on Broadway you derailed A Streetcar Named Desire, and made the tragedy of Blanche du Bois the first of your triumphs.
So defiantly Stanley Kowalski, there has been none since.
Because after Brando, all who follow are failed impersonators.
Bawling and bestial and funny, crude laughter of the Polack-male, the
humiliation of the Southern female whose rape is but another joke.
Because you were the consummate rapist, with the swagger of the rapist enacting the worst brute will of the audience.
Because you were Terry Malloy, the screen filled with your battered boy’s face.
Because sweetness and hurt were conjoined in that face.
Because you took up the glove dropped by Eva Marie Saint, and put it on
your hand, appropriating the blond Catholic girl and wearing her like a
glove.
Because you exposed your soul in yearning – I could’ve been a contender! – knowing how defeat, failure, ignominy would be your fate.
Because in 1955 at the age of 31, after having won an Academy Award for On the Waterfront,
you were interviewed by Edward R Murrow wreathed in cigarette smoke
like a shroud and in your rented stucco house in the hills above Los
Angeles already you were speaking of trying to be “normal”. Because you
endured the interviewer’s lame questions – “Have you discovered that
success can have its own problems?” – “Are you planning a long career as
an actor?”
Because you conceded, “I can’t do anything else well.”
Because you said you wanted to sing and dance on screen, you wanted to be “superficial” – you wanted to “entertain.”
Because on the mantel of the rented house was a portrait of your mother
at 40, your alcoholic mother who’d failed to love you enough.
Because your discomfort with the interview was evident.
Because you spoke of the fear of losing “anonymity” when already “anonymity” was lost.
Because the awkwardly staged interview ended with you playing bongo
drums with another drummer, in the bizarrely decorated basement of the
rented house. Because quickly then your hands slapped the drums with a
kind of manic precision, your eyes half-shut, a goofy happiness
softened your face.
Because at this moment it was not (yet) too late.
Because your beauty seduced you, and made of you a prankster.
Because the prankster always goes too far, that is the essence of prank.
Because you were a prankster, sowing death like semen.
Because all you had, you had to squander.
Because you tried, like Paul Muni, to disappear into film.
Because you were Mark Antony, Sky Masterson, Zapata, Fletcher Christian,
Napoleon! You were the clownish cross-dresser-outlaw of One-Eyed Jacks – a film debacle you’d directed yourself. You were Vito Corleone and you were the garrulous bald fat Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, mumbling and staggering in the dark, bloated American madness.
Because as the widower Paul of Last Tango in Paris you stripped your sick soul bare, in the radiance of disintegration. Because you were stunned in terror of annihilation yet played the clown, baring your buttocks on a Parisian dance floor.
Because confounded by the corpse of the dead beautiful wife framed
ludicrously in flowers you could hardly speak, and then you spoke too
much. Because you were stupid in grief. Because you could not forgive.
Wipe off the cosmetic mask! You hadn’t known the dead woman, and you
would not know the dead woman, who had not been faithful to you. All you
can know is the compliant body of your lover far too young for you, and
only as a body.
The futility of male sexuality, as a bulwark against death.
The farce of male sexuality, as a bulwark against death.
Because nonetheless you danced with astonishing drunken grace, with the girl young as a daughter. On the tango dance floor you spun, you fell to your knees, you shrugged off your coat, you were wearing a proper shirt and a tie to belie drunkenness and despair, fell flat on your back on the dance floor amid oblivious dancers and yet at once in rebuke of all expectation you were on your feet again and – dancing…
And in a drunken parody of tango you were unexpectedly light on your
feet, radiant in playfulness, clowning, in mockery of the heightened
emotions and sexual drama of tango – as in your youth you’d wanted to be
“superficial” and to “entertain” –
And then, lowering your trousers and baring your buttocks in the exhilaration of contempt.
Because the actor does not exist, if he is not the center of attention.
Because the actor’s heart is an emptiness, no amount of adulation can
fill.
Because after the slapstick-tango you lay curled in the exhaustion of grief and in the muteness of grief, a fetal corpse on a balcony in greylit Paris.
In Hell, there is tango. The other dancers dance on.
Because you made of self-loathing a caprice of art.
Because what was good in you, your social conscience, your generosity to liberal causes, was swallowed up in the other.
Because you squandered yourself in a sequence of stupid films as if in
defiance of your talent and of our expectations of that talent.
Because by late middle-age you’d lived too long.
Where there has been such love, there can be no forgiveness.
Because at 80 you’d endured successive stages of yourself, like a
great tree suffocated in its own rings, beginning to rot from within.
Because when you died, we understood that you had died long before.
Because we could not forgive you, who had thrown greatness away.
Because you have left us. And we are lonely.
And we would join you in Hell, if you would have us.
"Both Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would , without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it...Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong."
"And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building," said Gimli. "It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise."
"Yet seldom do they fall of their seed," said Legolas. "And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli."
"And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess," said the Dwarf.
"To that the Elves know not the answer," said Legolas.
I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.
I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.
For still there are so many things that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring there is a different green.
I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago,
and people who will see a world that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet and voices at the door.
Bilbo Baggins
The fate of the earth. The fate of me. The fate of you. The fate of Faisal. The fate of the court where Faisal will plead his case. The fate of the court’s bias. Every court has a bias. It sifts to the surface gradually. The fate of whomever we drink to after court. The fate of that branch of mathematics that deals with ‘dead-end depth’. The fate of Yemen where Faisal will probably never return. The fate of the engineering job Faisal had in Yemen before the events in question. The fate of the ‘simple random walk’ and its difference from the ‘homesick random walk’, concepts from a mathematics textbook I read once about dead-end depth. The fate of Montreal where Faisal lives now. The fate of his family, the ones still alive, back in Yemen and the fate of the bridal couple, still alive, whose wedding was the target of the drone pilot (a mistake). The fate of the others, not still alive (a mistake). The fate of the moon that rose over us as we drove through the mountains of Pennsylvania to be present at Faisal’s day in court. The fate of the silveriness of the moon that no words can ever describe. The fate of the bright sleepless night. The fate of our phones, which we decide to take to the courthouse at 9 a.m. and relinquish at the door. The fate of two guys doing a job interview in the cafeteria where we stop for coffee on the way to courtroom 31. Been around the block, says one guy. Army does the billing, says the other guy. The fate of so many men in suits and ties. The fate of being lost in marble corridors. The fate of being much too early at courtroom 31. The fate of the knot of lawyers who surround Faisal as he enters in a new suit. The fate of congratulating him on his new suit. The fate of his smile. His smile is great. The fate of the numerous clerks who pour glasses of water for the judges and generally fuss around. The fate of the appellant whose case precedes Faisal’s, which concerns a warrant ‘so lacking in probable cause’ that [something to do with ‘Garcia’] [something to do with gangs and ‘a constitutional path’]. The fate of the pearls worn by Judge Dillard, who sits on the far right of the bench, which curve like teeth below her actual teeth. The fate of straining to hear what Faisal’s lawyer, with his back to us, says to the judges. The fate of him perhaps saying that the government is asking the court to refrain from judging, asking the court to step back without knowing what it is stepping back from. The fate of proportionality, a matter of context. The fate of what is or is not a political question. The fate of the precedent called ‘al Shifa’, with which everyone seems familiar. The fate of a publicly acknowledged programme of targeting people who might be a danger to us. The fate of inscrutable acronyms. The fate of me totally losing the thread of the argument as we distinguish ‘merits’ from ‘standing’. The fate of what Faisal is seeking, which is now given as ‘declaratory relief’ (new phrase to me). The fate of ‘plaintiffs who have no chance of being harmed in the future due to being deceased’, a wording that gives pause. The fate of how all this may depend on her pearls, her teeth. The fate of the sentence, ‘We are really sorry, we made a mistake,’ which Judge Dillard utters in a hypothetical context but still it’s good to hear. The fate of the government lawyer who is blonde and talks too fast, using ‘jurisdictional’ many times and adding ‘as the relief sought is unavailable’. The fate of wondering why it is unavailable to say, ‘Sorry’. The fate of Judge Dillard’s invitation to the government lawyer to tell the plaintiff how he might ‘exhaust all administrative avenues of redress’, as the government claims he should have done before bringing this case. ‘Where would he go?’ Judge Dillard asks with apparent honest curiosity. ‘If you were he, where would you go?’ The fate of our bewildered conversation afterwards about why she said this, whose side she is on, what she expects Faisal’s lawyers to do with it now. The fate of the tuna sandwiches eaten with Faisal while debating this. The fate of his quietness while others talk. The fate of his smile, which seems to invite the soul, centuries ago. Serving tea, let’s say, to guests. The moon above them. Joy. The fate of disinterestedness, of joy, of what would Kant say, of not understanding what kind of thing the law is anyway, for example in its similarity to mathematics, for they both pretend to perfect objectivity but objectivity is a matter of wording and words can be, well, a mistake. The fate of the many thoughts that go on in Faisal when he is quiet, or the few thoughts, how would I know? The fate of the deep sea diver that he resembles, isolated, adrift. The fate of him back in his kitchen in Montreal next week or next year, sitting on a chair or standing at the window, the moon by then perhaps a thin cry, perhaps gone. The fate of simplicity, of randomness, of homesickness, of dead ends, of souls. Who can say how silvery it was? Where would he go? Sorry?
Sasha, a quiet drunk, an esoteric, a poet,
spent the entire summer in the city.
When the shooting began, he was surprised —
started watching the news, then stopped.
He walks around the city with headphones on,
listening to golden oldies,
as he stumbles into burned-out cars,
blown-up bodies.
What will survive from the history
of the world in which we lived
will be the words and music of a few geniuses
who desperately tried to warn us,
tried to explain, but failed to explain anything
or save anyone;
these geniuses lie in cemeteries
and out of their ribcages
grow flowers and grass.
Nothing else will remain —
only their music and songs, a voice
that forces you to love.
You can choose to never turn off this music.
Listen to the cosmos, shut your eyes.
Think about whales in the ocean at night.
Hear nothing else.
See nothing else.
Feel nothing else.
Except, of course, for the smell,
the smell of corpses.
"And so Kreindel learned the story of Eve's fashioning from Adam's rib, and its accompanying lesson: Thus a women is strong by nature, for she was created from a bone, while a man, created from earth, is weak, and quickly dissolves."
A Song Near the End of the World
Because I suddenly think of the bear—
my head jerks up—doesn’t mean the bear
is near. I was here four months before I saw the bear.
Huge exhausted mammal trudged by the porch—it was the bear
Joe told me Sue had seen while she was picking berries.
Male, five hundred pounds, the bear
was massive in front, and tapered toward the bare
patch on the furred almost curly truculent rear.
Such a hot midsummer, such a tired bear.
He was like a god—so much space was filled with bear.
Like a cumulonimbus come down to earth—a density of bear
with blood in him, and teeth, and a bear
liver and bear
lights. A pirate bear, a private bear, a lone bear,
it may be a father bear, it is a son bear,
a quarantine bear,
doing the essential work of his life—an endangered bear.
We did not share breath—I was behind the window, and the bear
passed on the other side of the porch rails like a bear
passing through bars of sunlight. And bears
are imprisoned now in smaller and smaller wild jails for bears.
When I stand at a bush now and pick a blackberry,
I wonder how the bear
does it, with his teeth or his bear
claws, which in my youth were bear-
mitt pastries, brown sugar embedded with poppy seeds like the dirt and gore in bear
hands—people were eaten by bears
every summer. My favorite part of this bear
was his velvety golden-brown bear
muzzle. Galway and I were mates, in a way—a friendship that could bear
strong hugs. To me, a male—bear
or human—was an unknown, like my husband, like Galway. I bore
many poems by Galway, and he bore
many by me. Was “The Bear”
a boy? I think so. A human being was male, then. A girl bear
might have seemed too much like a mother—what man then could bear
his mother. I think this song is like a mate for Galway’s “Bear.”
A friend at the end of the world—it is barely
known how long we can go on. A wish for the bear:
pleasure, safe cubs born
and yet to be born; ease of bear
mind; bear
heart’s ease, and a dream of a bear
heaven, hills and woods of comb-born honey.
In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.
2
I take a wolf's rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.
And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.
And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.
3
On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.
4
On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.
I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.
I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.
5
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.
6
Until one day I totter and fall—
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,
blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.
7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?
Countless schemes have been proposed for solving or dismissing this problem, most of them impracticable or impossible. Of this class are such proposals as: (1) the deportation of 12,000,000 Negroes to Africa; (2) the establishment of a separate Negro state in the United States; (3) complete separation and segregation from the whites and the establishment of a caste system or peasant class; and (4) hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro race. (The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot, 1922, published by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, page xxiii)
1
you don’t have enough boats
we came here head to toe
spoiling like old meat
in every liquid thing a body can make
the bravest gone to Yemaya
and now we are millions
and now we demand to sit upright
and so you don’t have enough boats
2
you would give us the most wretched desert,
not the desert of our fathers where god is watching
and manna comes down like the snow.
you would give us a desert of sorrows and nothing.
you would give us the dream
where you want only to yell and no noise comes
you would give us all that is barren
you would give our children sand to eat
3
we been had that
4
you said
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro race
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro
hope for a solution through the dying out
you said hope for the Negro dying
hope through the dying
hope for the dying out
the solution dying
you said dying. the Negro
the Negro dying
the Negro hope
hope the Negro
you said hope for dying
hope dying
dying
dying
you said hope
On Christmas Eve, 1968, astronaut Bill Anders
Snapped a photo of the earth
As Apollo 8 orbited the moon.
Those three guys
Were surprised
To see from their eyes
Our planet looked like an earthrise
A blue orb hovering over the moon’s gray horizon,
with deep oceans and silver skies.
It was our world’s first glance at itself
Our first chance to see a shared reality,
A declared stance and a commonality;
A glimpse into our planet’s mirror,
And as threats drew nearer,
Our own urgency became clearer,
As we realize that we hold nothing dearer
than this floating body we all call home.
We’ve known
That we’re caught in the throes
Of climactic changes some say
Will just go away,
While some simply pray
To survive another day;
For it is the obscure, the oppressed, the poor,
Who when the disaster
Is declared done,
Still suffer more than anyone.
Climate change is the single greatest challenge of our time,
Of this, you’re certainly aware.
It’s saddening, but I cannot spare you
From knowing an inconvenient fact, because
It’s getting the facts straight that gets us to act and not to wait.
So I tell you this not to scare you,
But to prepare you, to dare you
To dream a different reality,
Where despite disparities
We all care to protect this world,
This riddled blue marble, this little true marvel
To muster the verve and the nerve
To see how we can serve
Our planet. You don’t need to be a politician
To make it your mission to conserve, to protect,
To preserve that one and only home
That is ours,
To use your unique power
To give next generations the planet they deserve.
We are demonstrating, creating, advocating
We heed this inconvenient truth, because we need to be anything but lenient
With the future of our youth.
And while this is a training,
in sustaining the future of our planet,
There is no rehearsal. The time is
Now
Now
Now,
Because the reversal of harm,
And protection of a future so universal
Should be anything but controversial.
So, earth, pale blue dot
We will fail you not.
Just as we chose to go to the moon
We know it’s never too soon
To choose hope.
We choose to do more than cope
With climate change
We choose to end it—
We refuse to lose.
Together we do this and more
Not because it’s very easy or nice
But because it is necessary,
Because with every dawn we carry
the weight of the fate of this celestial body orbiting a star.
And as heavy as that weight sounded, it doesn’t hold us down,
But it keeps us grounded, steady, ready,
Because an environmental movement of this size
Is simply another form of an earthrise.
To see it, close your eyes.
Visualize that all of us leaders in this room
and outside of these walls or in the halls, all
of us changemakers are in a spacecraft,
Floating like a silver raft
in space, and we see the face of our planet anew.
We relish the view;
We witness its round green and brilliant blue,
Which inspires us to ask deeply, wholly:
What can we do?
Open your eyes.
Know that the future of
this wise planet
Lies right in sight:
Right in all of us. Trust
this earth uprising.
All of us bring light to exciting solutions never tried before
For it is our hope that implores us, at our uncompromising core,
To keep rising up for an earth more than worth fighting for.
Dedicated to Al Gore and The Climate Reality Project
The following poem by Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of the United States Amanda Gorman (link is external) was read from stage at the Los Angeles Climate Reality Leadership Corps Training on Tuesday, August 28, 2018.
I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it.
This crisis mentality is a vital component of the process of political change. There were no assurances, no guarantees of success, and a constant fear that the entire structure would come crashing to ruin. Imposing patterns on the period in hindsight, we often forget that this was a world of chance and circumstance, where voting patterns and probabilities that seem obvious to us were obscured in a cloud of uncertainties and fears.
When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.
We braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.
And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.
And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.
This is the era of just redemption.
We feared at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.
But within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, become the future.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain.
If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the golden hills of the West.
We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states.
We will rise from the sun-baked South.
We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.
And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.
When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid.
The new dawn balloons as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
John Muir said that if it ever came to a war between the races, he would side with the bears. That day has arrived.
(Sometimes I wonder:
What to say to you now
in the soft afternoon air as you
hold us all in a single death?)
I say—
Where is your fire?
I say—
Where is your fire?
You got to find it and pass it on.
You got to find it and pass it on
from you to me from me to her from her
to him from the son to the father from the
brother to the sister from the daughter to
the mother from the mother to the child.
Where is your fire? I say where is your fire?
Can’t you smell it coming out of our past?
The fire of living…not dying
The fire of loving…not killing
The fire of Blackness…not gangster shadows.
Where is our beautiful fire that gave light
to the world?
The fire of pyramids;
The fire that burned through the holes of
slaveships and made us breathe;
The fire that made guts into chitterlings;
The fire that took rhythms and made jazz;
The fire of sit-ins and marches that made
us jump boundaries and barriers;
The fire that took street talk sounds
and made righteous imhotep raps.
Where is your fire, the torch of life
full of Nzingha and Nat Turner and Garvey
and DuBois and Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin
and Malcolm and Mandela.
Sister/Sistah Brother/Brotha Come/Come
CATCH YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
HOLD YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
LEARN YOUR FIRE…DON’T KILL
BE THE FIRE…DON’T KILL
Catch the fire and burn with eyes
that see our souls:
WALKING.
SINGING.
BUILDING.
LAUGHING.
LEARNING.
LOVING.
TEACHING.
BEING.
Hey. Brother/Brotha. Sister/Sista.
Here is my hand.
Catch the fire…and live.
live.
livelivelive.
livelivelive.
live. Sonia Sanchez
"San Diego Evening Tribune." The speaker is a woman. "A simpler question than Gary's: Can songs change the world?"
Too much like hard work for me, thinks Dean, looking at Elf, who looks at Griff, who says, "Hey I just drum along."
"Songs do not change the world", declares Jasper. "People do. People pass laws, riot, hear God, and act accordingly. People invent, kill, make babies, start wars." Jasper lights a Marlboro. "Which raises a question. 'Who or what influences the minds of the people who change the world?' My answer is 'Ideas and Feelings.' Which begs a question. 'Where do ideas and feelings originate?' My answer is, 'Others. One's heart and mind. The press. The arts. Stories. Last, but not least, songs.' Songs. Songs, like dandelion seeds, billowing across space and time. Who knows where they'll land? Or what they'll bring?" Jasper leans into the mic and, without a wisp of self-consciousness, sings a miscellany of single lines from nine or ten songs. Dean recognizes "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," "Strange Fruit", and "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine." Others, Dean can't identify, but the hardboiled press pack look on. Nobody laughs, nobody scoffs. Cameras click. "Where will these song-seeds land? It's the Parable of the Sower. Often, usually, they land on barren soil and don't take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready. Is fertile. What happens then? Feelings and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy. Assurance. Cathartic sorrow. The idea that life could be, should be, better than this. An invitation to slip into somebody else's skin for a little while. If a song plants an idea or a feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world."
Bloody hell, thinks Dean. I live with this guy.
"Why's everyone gone quiet?" Slightly alarmed, Jasper asks the band. "What that weird? Did I go too far?"
'
Five years later, I take a deep shuddery breath to stop myself crying. It's not just that I can't hold Aoife again, it's everything. It's grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office -- all so we didn't have to change our cozy lifestyles. People talk about the Endarkment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it's a plague of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth's Riches knowing -- while denying -- that we'd be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.