Jan. 21st, 2013

kingtycoon: (blue)
Whenever there's poetry I get dismissive and haughty.  Poetry - to me it never seems a big thing, until it is, you know - there's some that's sock-knocking but in the main?  Poetry...  I hear it and think, I could do better.  Without even trying.

Here's my call and response to the innaugural poem - took 10 minutes at the end of the workday

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores, peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces

The Sun rose on us today, maker of days that climbs out of the sea, over the mountains
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth

Creating the moments of the minutes of the hours of all the days of this world
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies. One light, waking up rooftops, under

To shine the feeding light that wakes the plains house by house

each one, a story told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

Each house a house itself, woken in its way behind windows

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors, each one yawning to life,

You and I and everyone’s faces in mirrors, waking to the waking dream

crescendoing into our day: pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,

that’s a land we call by the same name and where we have the same lives under the same sun.
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows begging our praise. Silver trucks

And pretend at having a same history in the same soil we wake ourselves and our machines after

heavy with oil or paper— bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,

and wake ourselves with the machines that all night and from history have gone on and on while we slept our solitary dreams

on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives— to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries

on our way – the one way that we all take to the place where our value is shared out and we are let to feel that we have given our worth

as my mother did for twenty years, so I could write this poem.

For years until we cannot and pass our labor down through the generations

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,

All of us a portion of the greater thing which the light encompasses and encloses
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day: equations to solve, history to question, or

That light, seconds old from its nuclear birth

atoms imagined, the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,

Defining our perceptions reflecting a dead man’s words
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain the empty desks of twenty children

Who called on us to think not of the unchangeable moment but of the mutable future marked absent

That we wait for without earning
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light

Today only just failing to recapitulate yesterday, and the day before like the day before
breathing color into stained glass windows,

So we say that we have asked for death by offering death
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth

And only wished and dreamed for more than murder
onto the steps of our museums and park benches

And did not look for something better but clung to the vain words of dead men.
as mothers watch children slide into the day.

One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk

One ground, this ground that was ground to the teeming extinct creatures
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat

The assassinated people, the bloody fields of genocides
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm,

Our ground, we say dreaming vainly – and how much more blood will soak it for us to keep it?

hands digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands

So every tomorrow can still be ours, a recapitulation of our todays

as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane

That are made of toil
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.

That are wasted in pursuit of waste

The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains mingled by one wind—our breath. Breathe. Hear it through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs, buses launching down avenues, the symphony

of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways, the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.

Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,

And countenance all the minutia of the world, calling it a unique achievement and thus we’ll excuse ourselves our criminal inheritance, our wicked hopeless dreams.

February 2023

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