putting up
the fancy neighborhood mansions,
the wounded who sob emptying
the rubbish bins in the offices that
make this country rich, the children
who long for their deported parents
from unimaginable depths are like
you in the settling night searching
simply for a place to call sweet, sweet
home. in the ordinary days when you
cannot find time to listen to the words
shouting of another world, when you
turn away from dark hands that offer to
set you free, in the silences across
this earth, the revelations of detested
refugees, remember these lives and
all their other tongues more than the
management’s present inhumanity.
Say
the children
cry justice
beneath
heaven’s
dimming light,
a thing in
cruelty past
so many did
see. the older
generation with
near forgotten
dreams reaches
with the darkest
hands
for signs
that read
Lord of Mercy,
tell these
people
full of
hate, America,
the beautiful,
so beautiful
too with me.
The Place
they read the English clocks made
in China, always go to work on time,
play the lottery for a big hit, never complain
of a thing, walk the unknown streets, send their
kids to schools offering books with a hundred pages
missing, bury their dead in cheap wood with grief
fixed to their wrinkled faces, breathe the angry air
telling them how to misspell their names, live to
see poverty abounding from generation to the
next, know hunger, illness, fatigue, work that keeps
them close to death, and listen to the devilish cries
of hate that surrounds them in a forgotten place so
carefully slighted by all your Gods. they lean into
the light of day, stand in the quiet of night, kneel
in prayer in sparsely furnished rooms, talk
with ghostly listeners, and wait for an answer to
their cries from a world unwilling to deliver even
a hint of slanting light. when the children ask what
dreams will come for them, what will you whisper
into their beautiful innocent ears?
Night
every night she sat
at the kitchen table
eating bread, her old age
telling me not to close
the door, and listen to her
closely for truth. she was
like a book checked out of
an old library before my eyes
with a soul deeper than a
city beggar’s cup. we sat
quietly at the table listening
to the wind howl outside the
window, the radiator talking in
the cold space like it was reading
a Charles Dickens’ novel. then,
in silence beyond help, the elderly
woman told me she dreamed her
teen son alive again in the apartment
saying to her, “mother.” I remember
that night so clearly, we looked at old
photographs that adored hearing her
speak, images frozen in time, with
sounds of crying and laughter roaming
in the old ladies heart. that night, I
pleaded to God above let this woman
know sweet love and everlasting
peace.
Old Revolutionaries
there is a place for times like this
where old revolutionaries thought
gone still gather to talk about how
they overcame persecuting days in
another country. for decades they
have
