i-eclectica.org

[Originally I had planned to summarise this article; then I thought I could copy and paste snippets, like scattering selected pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Finally I realised that the only way for me to preserve the very essence of this statement is to leave it untouched.]

Ten Dispatches About Place

by John Berger

Published in the July/August 2007 issue of Orion magazine

Photos: Anabell Guerrero

(1)
Somebody inquires: are you still a marxist? Never before has the devastation caused by the pursuit of profit, as defined by capitalism, been more extensive than it is today. Almost everybody knows this. How then is it possible not to heed Marx, who prophesied and analyzed the devastation? The answer might be that people, many people, have lost all their political bearings. Mapless, they do not know where they are heading.

(2)
Every day people follow signs pointing to some place that is not their home but a chosen destination. Road signs, airport embarkation signs, terminal signs. Some are making their journeys for pleasure, others for business, many out of loss or despair. On arrival they come to realize they are not in the place indicated by the signs they followed. Where they now find themselves has the correct latitude, longitude, local time, currency, yet it does not have the specific gravity of the destination they chose.

They are beside the place they chose to come to. The distance that separates them from it is incalculable. Maybe it’s only the width of a thoroughfare, maybe it’s a world away. The place has lost what made it a destination. It has lost its territory of experience.

Sometimes a few of these travelers undertake a private journey and find the place they wished to reach, which is often harsher than they foresaw, although they discover it with boundless relief. Many never make it. They accept the signs they follow and it’s as if they don’t travel, as if they always remain where they already are.

(3)
The details in the image on this page were taken by Anabell Guerrero in the Red Cross shelter for refugees and emigrants at Sangatte near Calais and the Channel Tunnel. On orders from the British and French governments, the shelter was recently shut down. Several hundred people were sheltering there, many hoping to make it to Britain. The man in the photographs—Guerrero prefers not to disclose his name—is from Zaire.

Month by month millions leave their homelands. They leave because there is nothing there, except their everything, which does not offer enough to feed their children. Once it did. This is the poverty of the new capitalism.

After long and terrible journeys, after they have experienced the baseness of which others are capable, after they have come to trust their own incomparable and dogged courage, emigrants find themselves waiting on some foreign transit station, and then all they have left of their home continent is themselves: their hands, their eyes, their feet, shoulders, bodies, what they wear, and what they pull over their heads at night to sleep under, wanting a roof.

Thanks to Guerrero’s image we can take account of how a man’s fingers are all that remain of a plot of tilled earth, his palms what remain of some riverbed, and how his eyes are a family gathering he will not attend. Portrait of an emigrant continent.

(4)
“I’m going down the stairs in an underground station to take the B line. Crowded here. Where are you? Really! What’s the weather like? Getting into the train—call you later…”

Of the millions of mobile telephone conversations taking place every hour in the world’s cities and suburbs, most, whether they are private or business, begin with a statement about the caller’s whereabouts. People need straightaway to pinpoint where they are. It is as if they are pursued by doubts suggesting that they may be nowhere. Surrounded by so many abstractions, they have to invent and share their own transient landmarks.

More than thirty years ago Guy Debord prophetically wrote: “the accumulation of mass-produced commodities for the abstract space of the market, just as it has smashed all regional and legal barriers, and all corporate restrictions of the Middle Ages that maintained the quality of artisanal production, has also destroyed the autonomy and quality of places.”

The key term of the present global chaos is de- or relocalization. This does not only refer to the practice of moving production to wherever labor is cheapest and regulations minimal. It also contains the offshore demented dream of the new ongoing power: the dream of undermining the status of and confidence in all previous fixed places, so that the entire world becomes a single fluid market.

The consumer is essentially somebody who feels or is made to feel lost unless he or she is consuming. Brand names and logos become the place names of the Nowhere.

Other signs announcing FREEDOM or DEMOCRACY, terms plundered from earlier historical periods, are also used to confuse. In the past a common tactic employed by those defending their homeland against invaders was to change the road signs so that the one indicating ZARAGOZA pointed in the opposite direction toward BURGOS. Today it is not defenders but invaders who switch signs to confuse local populations, confuse them about who is governing whom, the nature of happiness, the extent of grief, or where eternity is to be found. And the aim of all these misdirections is to persuade people that being a client is the ultimate salvation.

Yet clients are defined by where they check out and pay, not by where they live and die.

(5)
Extensive areas that were once rural places are being turned into zones. The details of the process vary according to the continent—Africa or Central America or Southeast Asia. The initial dismembering, however, always comes from elsewhere and from corporate interests pursuing their appetite for ever more accumulation, which means seizing natural resources (fish in Lake Victoria, wood in the Amazon, petrol wherever it is to be found, uranium in Gabon, etc.), regardless of to whom the land or water belongs.

The ensuing exploitation soon demands airports, military, and paramilitary bases to defend what is being siphoned off, and collaboration with the local mafiosi. Tribal war, famine, and genocide may follow.

People in such zones lose all sense of residence: children become orphans (even when they are not), women become slaves, men desperadoes. Once this has happened, to restore any sense of domesticity takes generations. Each year of such accumulation prolongs the Nowhere in time and space.

(6)
Meanwhile—and political resistance often begins in a meanwhile—the most important thing to grasp and remember is that those who profit from the present chaos, with their embedded commentators in the media, continuously misinform and misdirect. Their declarations and all the plundered terms they are in the habit of using should never be argued with. They have to be rejected outright and abandoned. They will get nobody anywhere.

The information technology developed by the corporations and their armies so they could dominate their Nowhere more speedily is being used by others as a means of communication throughout the Everywhere they are struggling toward.

The Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant puts this very well: “the way to resist globalisation is not to deny globality, but to imagine what is the finite sum of all possible particularities and to get used to the idea that, as long as a single particularity is missing, globality will not be what it should be for us.”

We are establishing our own landmarks, naming places, finding poetry. Yes, in the Meanwhile poetry is to be found.

As the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey

as the rose buds a green room to breathe
and blossoms like the wind

as the thin birches whisper their stories of the wind to the urgent
in the trucks

as the leaves of the hedge store the light
the day thought it had lost

as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a sparrow in the turning air

as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky
and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark

hold everything dear

—Gareth Evans

(7)
Their Nowhere generates a strange, because unprecedented, awareness of time. Digital time. It continues forever uninterrupted through day and night, the seasons, birth, and death. As indifferent as money. Yet, although continuous, it is utterly single. It is the time of the present kept apart from the past and future. Within it, only the present is weight-bearing; the other two lack gravity. Time is no longer a colonnade, but a single column of ones and zeros. A vertical time with nothing surrounding it, except absence.

Read a few pages of Emily Dickinson and then go and see Lars von Trier’s film Dogville. In Dickinson’s poetry the presence of the eternal is attendant in every pause. The film, by contrast, remorselessly shows what happens when any trace of the eternal is erased from daily life. What happens is that all words and their entire language are rendered meaningless.

Within a single present, within digital time, no whereabouts can be found or established.

(8)
We will take our bearings within another time-set. The eternal, according to Spinoza (who was Marx’s dearest philosopher) is now. It is not something awaiting us, but something we encounter during those brief yet timeless moments when everything accommodates everything and no exchange is inadequate.

In her urgent book Hope In the Dark, Rebecca Solnit quotes the Sandinista poet Gioconda Belli describing the moment when the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown in Nicaragua: “two days that felt as if a magical, age-old spell had been cast over us, taking us back to Genesis, to the very site of the creation of the world.” The fact that the U.S. and its mercenaries later destroyed the Sandinistas in no way diminishes that moment existing in the past, present, and future.

(9)
A kilometer down the road from where I’m writing, there is a field in which four burros graze, two mares and two foals. They are a particularly small species. The black-bordered ears of the mares, when they prick them, come up to my chin. The foals, only a few weeks old, are the size of large terriers, with the difference that their heads are almost as large as their sides.

I climb over the fence and sit in the field with my back against the trunk of an apple tree. The burros have made their own tracks across the field and some pass under very low branches where I would have to stoop double. They watch me. There are two areas where there is no grass at all, just reddish earth, and it is to one of these rings that they come many times a day to roll on their backs. Mare first, then foal. The foals already have their black stripe across their shoulders.

Now they approach me. They smell of donkeys and bran—not the smell of horses, more discreet. The mares touch the top of my head with their lower jaws. Their muzzles are white. Around their eyes are flies, far more agitated than their own questioning glances.

When they stand in the shade by the edge of the wood the flies go away, and they can stand there almost motionless for half an hour. In the shade at midday, time slows down. When one of the foals suckles (ass’s milk is the closest to human milk), the mare’s ears lie right back and point to her tail.

Surrounded by the four of them in the sunlight, my attention fixes on their legs, all sixteen of them. Their slenderness, their sheerness, their containment of concentration, their surety. (Horses’ legs look hysterical by comparison.) Theirs are legs for crossing mountains no horse could tackle, legs for carrying loads that are unimaginable if one considers only the knees, the shanks, the fetlocks, the hocks, the cannon bones, the pastern joints, the hooves. Donkeys’ legs.

They wander away, heads down, grazing, their ears missing nothing; I watch them, eyes skinned. In our exchanges, such as they are, in the midday company we offer one another, there is a substratum of what I can only describe as gratitude. Four burros in a field, month of June, year 2005.

(10)
Yes, I’m still among other things a marxist.

John Berger was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel G. and a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in France.

When he was not yet 17, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) electrified Paris’s literary society with the incendiary poems that later made him the guiding saint of 20th-century rebels, from Pablo Picasso to Jim Morrison. “A Season in Hell,” “The Drunken Boat,” and the prose poems of Illuminations were epochal works that changed the nature of an art form–and yet their author abandoned poetry at age 21 and spent the rest of his short life as a colonial adventurer in Arabia and Africa. “He was writing in a void,” explains British scholar Graham Robb. “In 1876, most of Rimbaud’s admirers either were still in the nursery or had yet to be conceived.” Hardly surprising, since the poet was a difficult and frequently unpleasant person to actually know. The Parisian poets who took him under their wing soon discovered that Rimbaud was ungrateful, crude, and as scornful of their precious verse as he was of the Catholic Church, bourgeois proprieties, and everything else his disapproving mother held dear. Rimbaud’s stormy affair with Paul Verlaine estranged the older poet from his wife and, eventually, from most of his artistic friends as well. In Robb’s depiction, the poet possessed from his earliest youth a restless, searching intellect that permitted no compromise with convention nor tenderness for others’ weaknesses. The author doesn’t soften Rimbaud’s “savage cynicism” or gloss over his frequently obnoxious behavior, yet Robb arouses our admiration for “one of the great Romantic imaginations, festering in damp, provincial rooms like an intelligent disease.” Like Robb’s excellent biographies of Hugo and Balzac, this sharp, subtle, unsentimental portrait is both erudite and beautifully written. - [Wendy Smith on “Arthur Rimbaud - A Biography” by Graham Robb]

[thank you to Famous Poets & Poems]

Sun and Flesh (Credo in Unam)

I

The Sun, the hearth of affection and life,
Pours burning love on the delighted earth,
And when you lie down in the valley, you can smell
How the earth is nubile and very full-blooded;
How its huge breast, heaved up by a soul,
Is, like God, made of love, and, like woman, of flesh,
And that it contains, big with sap and with sunlight,
The vast pullulation of all embryos!

And everything grows, and everything rises!

- O Venus, O Goddess!
I long for the days of antique youth,
Of lascivious satyrs, and animal fauns,
Gods who bit, mad with love, the bark of the boughs,
And among water-lilies kissed the Nymph with fair hair!
I long for the time when the sap of the world,
River water, the rose-coloured blood of green trees
Put into the veins of Pan a whole universe!
When the earth trembled, green,beneath his goat-feet;
When, softly kissing the fair Syrinx, his lips formed
Under heaven the great hymn of love;
When, standing on the plain, he heard round about him
Living Nature answer his call;
When the silent trees cradling the singing bird,
Earth cradling mankind, and the whole blue Ocean,
And all living creatures loved, loved in God!

I long for the time of great Cybele,
Who was said to travel, gigantically lovely,
In a great bronze chariot, through splendid cities;
Her twin breasts poured, through the vast deeps,
The pure streams of infinite life.
Mankind sucked joyfully at her blessed nipple,
Like a small child playing on her knees.
- Because he was strong, Man was gentle and chaste.

Misfortune! Now he says: I understand things,
And goes about with eyes shut and ears closed.
- And again, no more gods! no more gods! Man is King,
Man is God! But the great faith is Love!
Oh! if only man still drew sustenance from your nipple,
Great mother of gods and of men, Cybele;
If only he had not forsaken immortal Astarte
Who long ago, rising in the tremendous brightness
Of blue waters, flower-flesh perfumed by the wave,
Showed her rosy navel, towards which the foam came snowing
And, being a goddess with the great conquering black eyes,
Made the nightingale sing in the woods and love in men’s hearts!

II

I believe! I believe in you! divine mother,
Sea-born Aphrodite! - Oh! the path is bitter
Since the other God harnessed us to his cross;
Flesh, Marble, Flower, Venus, in you I believe!
- yes, Man is sad and ugly, sad under the vast sky.
He possesses clothes, because he is no longer chaste,
Because he has defiled his proud, godlike head
And because he has bent, like an idol in the furnace,
His Olympian form towards base slaveries!
Yes, even after death, in the form of pale skeletons
He wishes to live and insult the original beauty!
- And the Idol in whom you placed such maidenhood,
Woman, in whom you rendered our clay divine,
So that Man might bring light into his poor soul
And slowly ascend, in unbounded love,
From the earthly prison to the beauty of day,
Woman no longer knows even how to be a Courtesan!
- It’s a fine farce! and the world snickers
At the sweet and sacred name of great Venus!

III

If only the times which have come and gone might come again!
- For Man is finished! Man has played all the parts!
In the broad daylight, wearied with breaking idols
He will revive, free of all his gods,
And, since he is of heaven, he will scan the heavens!
The Ideal, that eternal, invincible thought, which is
All; The living god within his fleshly clay,
Will rise, mount, burn beneath his brow!
An when you see him plumbing the whole horizon,
Despising old yokes, and free from all fear,
You will come and give him holy Redemption!
- Resplendent, radiant, from the bosom of the huge seas
You will rise up and give to the vast Universe
Infinite Love with its eternal smile!
The World will vibrate like an immense lyre
In the trembling of an infinite kiss!

- The World thirsts for love: you will come and slake its thirst.

…………………………………………….

O! Man has raised his free, proud head!
And the sudden blaze of primordial beauty
Makes the god quiver in the altar of the flesh!
Happy in the present good, pale from the ill suffered,
Man wishes to plumb all depths, - and know all things! Thought,
So long a jade, and for so long oppressed,
Springs from his forehead! She will know Why!…
Let her but gallop free, and Man will find Faith!
- Why the blue silence, unfathomable space?
Why the golden stars, teeming like sands?
If one ascended forever, what would one see up there?
Does a sheperd drive this enormous flock
Of worlds on a journey through this horror of space?
And do all these worlds contained in the vast ether,
tremble at the tones of an eternal voice?
- And Man, can he see? can he say: I believe?
Is the langage of thought anymore than a dream?
If man is born so quickly, if life is so short
Whence does he come? Does he sink into the deep Ocean
Of Germs, of Foetuses, of Embryos, to the bottom
of the huge Crucible where Nature the Mother
Will resuscitate him, a living creature,
To love in the rose and to grow in the corn?…

We cannot know! - We are weighed down
With a cloak of ignorance, hemmed in by chimaeras!
Men like apes, dropped from our mothers’ wombs,
Our feeble reason hides the infinite from us!
We wish to perceive: - and Doubt punishes us!
Doubt, dismal bird, beat us down with its wing…
- And the horizon rushes away in endless flight!…

……………………………………………….

The vast heaven is open! the mysteries lie dead
Before erect Man, who folds his strong arms
Among the vast splendour of abundant Nature!
He sings… and the woods sing, the river murmurs
A song full of happiness which rises towards the light!…
- it is Redemption! it is love! it is love!…

………………………………………………..

IV

O splendour of flesh! O ideal splendour!
O renewal of love, triumphal dawn
When, prostrating the Gods and the Heroes,
White Callipyge and little Eros
Covered with the snow of rose petals, will caress
Women and flowers beneath their lovely outstretched feet!
- O great Ariadne who pour out your tears
On the shore, as you see, out there on the waves,
The sail of Theseus flying white under the sun,
O sweet virgin child whom a night has broken,
Be silent! On his golden chariot studded with black grapes,
Lysios, who has been drawn through Phrygian fields
By lascivious tigers and russet panthers,
Reddens the dark mosses along the blue rivers.
- Zeus, the Bull, cradles on his neck like a child
The nude body of Europa who throws her white arm
Round the God’s muscular neck which shivers in the wave.
Slowly he turns his dreamy eye towards her;
She, droops her pale flowerlike cheek
On the brow of Zeus; her eyes are closed; she is dying
In a divine kiss, and the murmuring waters
Strew the flowers of their golden foam on her hair.
- Between the oleander and the gaudy lotus tree
Slips amorously the great dreaming Swan
Enfloding Leda in the whiteness of his wing;
- And while Cypris goes by, strangely beautiful,
And, arching the marvellous curves of her back,
Proudly displays the golden vision of her big breasts
And snowy belly embroidered with black moss,
- Hercules, Tamer of beasts, in his Strength,
Robes his huge body with the lion’s skin as with glory
And faces the horizons, his brow terrible and sweet!

Vaguely lit by the summer moon,
Erect, naked, dreaming in her pallor of gold
Streaked by the heavy wave of her long blue hair,
In the shadowy glade whenre stars spring in the moss,
The Dryade gazes up at the silent sky…
- White Selene, timidly, lets her veil float,
Over the feet of beautiful Endymion,
And throws him a kiss in a pale beam…
- The Spring sobs far off in a long ectasy…
Ii is the nymph who dreams with one elbow on her urn,
Of the handsome white stripling her wave has pressed against.
- A soft wind of love has passed in the night,
And in the sacred woods, amid the standing hair of the great trees,
Erect in majesty, the shadowly Marbles,
The Gods, on whose brows the Bullfinch has his nest,
- the Gods listen to Men, and to the infinite World!

Arthur Rimbaud, May 1870

[thank you to mag4]

Today, Chilean time, 103 years ago was the birthday of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century: Pablo Neruda. I love poetry as an artform, but generally I am more focused on individual poems rather than poets - with very few exceptions, such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and Pablo Neruda. These poets deeply touch my soul, probably because their minds were shaped by the arising new spirit of their times, causing them to breach conventions and to rebel against the established order. And in doing so, they found expressions of passion and sensitivity, of rawness and beauty, of subtleness and yet often strongly announced intellectually clarity that makes me feel as if they speak for my own innermost depth.

Pablo Neruda was born in Parral, Chile on July 12, 1904 as Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. ‘Pablo Neruda’ became his pen name (derived from Czech writer and poet Jan Neruda) and later became his legal name. Neruda was not just a poet but also a passionate socialist, politician. During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic posts; from 1927 to 1945 he was the Chilean consul in Rangoon, in Java, and then in Barcelona. Between 1970 and 1973 he served in Allende’s Chilean Government as ambassador to Paris. Neruda joined the Communist Party after the Second World War and served a stint as senator for the Chilean Communist Party.

His political views often got him into trouble. When Conservative Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile, a warrant was issued for Neruda’s arrest. Friends hid him for months in a basement of a home in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Neruda then escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. And Neruda’s political views were even an obstacle to formal international recognition: it was only in 1971 that Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - after several years of being overlooked for his political activism.

What Pablo Neruda though is most famous for is his poetry. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language”. Having his works translated into dozens of languages, Pablo Neruda is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century. Neruda’s poetry had not only an incredible depth; he also was accomplished in a wide variety of styles, ranging from erotically charged love poems (such as “White Hills”), surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. Some of Neruda’s most beloved poems are his “Odes to Broken Things,” collected in several volumes.

Neruda’s poetic power and personal charisma found many more expressions of course than the few above given sketchy details of his life suggest. For example, he gave readings to the probably two largest audiences any poet had in history. On July 15, 1945 at Pacaembú Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people at an event in honour of Communist revolutionary Luis Carlos Prestes. And upon returning to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Salvador Allende invited Neruda to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.

His public and personal appeal even became an expression against Augusto Pinochet’s brutal rule. Neruda was hospitalised with cancer at the time of the CIA sponsored Pinochet’s coup d’état in which his close friend Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, was murdered together with thousands of others of his country men and women. Neruda died of heart failure twelve days later on September 23, 1973. Already a legend in life, Neruda’s death became charged with an intense symbolism that reverberated around the world. Pinochet had denied permission to transform Neruda’s funeral into a public event, but thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew, flooding the streets in tribute. Neruda’s funeral became the first public protest against the Chilean military dictatorship.

[For a detailed view of Neruda’s life and work click here. There are many sites on the Internet where his poetry can be found, like Poem Hunter or Famous Poets and Poems.]

The Field

There was a dirt field I’d walk to as a girl,
past the convenience store and the train tracks
where the day laborers congregated with six-packs,
where the two-lane road turned to one lane with yellow stripes
and the vacant field loomed like a desiccated fallen sky.

That’s where I’d go to sit on an oblong rock
until prairie dogs sprouted from tunnels underground
and the ground became a fabric
stitched by fluid lines of ants.
And though barely perceptible,

if I waited long enough,
the world would begin its shallow breathing,
the soundless wind’s only duty in that field
to rearrange a few grains of sand
while the smell of hot dust grew sharp in the nose.

I waited. I don’t know for what.
Sometimes I’d sit so long the sun would sink,
a fiery stare blinking shut beneath the horizon,
and the drooping electric wires would borrow the dark
until the dark seeped back into the sky. And when stars

surfaced like needles piercing through velvet,
I’d hold myself back just a moment more.
What made me feel watched in the naked field?
I was paying close attention and could discern only
a begging to be cloaked and a begging to be released.

Jennifer Grotz

[via Poetry Daily]

[When you live under the mountain]

When you live under the mountain
you do not see the mountain.
What mountain, you ask,
stirring your tea,
as your visitor falls silent
before the clouds.

Lola Haskins

Conjugated Visits

I love as if it mattered:
a pound of love’s feathers falling
fast as a pound of stone.

You love like a weed, unwanted,
taking up residence, calling
it home.

She loves as a snail would:
using him up for sustenance,
meticulously, leaving a trail.

He loves like the rabbit pulled
from a hat: startled, pedaling,
ambushed by thin air.

We love as the blind see: aware
of insect wings, timbre
the dog hears.

Love dusted treetops,
gutters, and hood ornaments;
she inhaled.

Love contained him
comfortably, a soft shoe;
on firmament he danced.

There would be no way
they could unlove now, unspice
the condiment,

uncook the stew, the braised
beast unslaughter, send it
ululating back to the herd.

Diane Kirsten Martin

Tobacco

To rid yourself of envy and sin
mix honey with tobacco.

— CUBAN FOLKSONG

Tabaco, tu boca,
tus bocas—your mouths,
sweet island uncles, your lips

fragrant with Cuban puros, and you
lifting me
in a cloud of smoke

for a good-night kiss, passing me,
one to one,
with your dark burly arms

hugging me close so that
my hair, my nightie, take back the smell
to linger over in bed under the mosquito net.

The cousins asleep in rows of cots on the veranda,
the ocean breeze billowing the netting
so it scratches my cheek—the lightest of stings.

Little huddles of white, snug as tobacco hills
swathed in gauze, baking the blonde inner leaves
to wrap, ring with bands and burn.

The sound of Mamita and her sisters singing
—Quando salí de l’Habana válgame dios—
Habana puro.

My shallow smoker’s breath,
asthmatic, subverts the soul’s infant desire,
but the memory of pleasure persists.

Tabaco, tu boca,
tus bocas—Lelén, Pili, Pancho,
and the priest, Benjamín, all the tíos

in starched guayaveras,
pleats pressed over their stout middles:
tobacco musk of men,

chiefs in a circle, smoking
the weed
like the first caciques

Columbus found when he waded to shore
at Puerto de Mares, Port of Seas,
Port of Surfs,

Port of Sorrows.
Tabaco. Tu boca—
No se toca.

Tio Cheo, you weren’t like the rest. Your
arms were smooth and pink and fine.
And your breath

smelled of guarapo when you leaned over
and sang to us
in your pitch perfect voice

American show tunes you’d picked up in college
before the seminary, before
the priesthood, before Uncle Ben

nailed you, took off your frock
and drove you
to Bellevue

where drugs and shock-treatment
dulled away desire.
Too mad now

even for the Franciscans, banished
from their monastery, your habit
repossessed,

you phone from the asylum, asking
for cigarettes: still, at eighty,
craving, unrequited.

Tu boca, Cheo—

Peg Boyers

Don’t Write History as Poetry

Don’t write history as poetry, because the weapon is
the historian. And the historian doesn’t get fever
chills when he names his victims, and doesn’t listen
to the guitar’s rendition. And history is the dailiness
of weapons prescribed upon our bodies. “The
intelligent genius is the mighty one.” And history
has no compassion that we can long for our
beginning, and no intention that we can know what’s ahead
and what’s behind … and it has no rest stops
by the railroad tracks for us to bury the dead, for us to look
toward what time has done to us over there, and what
we’ve done to time. As if we were of it and outside it.
History is not logical or intuitive that we can break
what is left of our myth about happy times,
nor is it a myth that we can accept our dwelling at the doors
of judgment day. It is in us and outside us … and a mad
repetition, from the catapult to the nuclear thunder.
Aimlessly we make it and it makes us … Perhaps
history wasn’t born as we desired, because
the Human Being never existed?
philosophers and artists passed through there …
and the poets wrote down the dailiness of their purple flowers
then passed through there … and the poor believed
in sayings about paradise and waited there…
and gods came to rescue nature from our divinity
and passed through there. And history has no
time for contemplation, history has no mirror
and no bare face. It is unreal reality
or unfanciful fancy, so don’t write it.
Don’t write it, don’t write it as poetry!

Mahmoud Darwish

[all poems are from Poetry Daily]