Resistance moon: A song amid so much noise

When it comes to repressive white supremacist governments, the Afrikaners got nothing on the likes of Texas and Arizona. The executive and legislative branches of both of those states are dedicated to keeping the Crow in Jim Crow, and to ensuring that Latinos keep their place, which is in the fields and bussing restaurant tables, and not in schools, in the professions or in government.

In 2010, the Arizona lege passed Senate Bill 1070, known grandiosely as the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act”. Its purpose was basically to allow law enforcement personnel to demand that any person stopped for questioning produce papers that show his or her immigration status. In theory this could be any person stopped for any reason; in practice it’s any person not white (and specifically any person looking Latino) stopped for any reason. It turns state and local cops into extensions of La Migra.

Bugger the Constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure; it’s all “Papiere, bitte.” There were multiple suits filed against SB 1070, and in 2012 the Supreme Court upheld the provision requiring immigration status checks during stops, but struck three other provisions.

I expect that with the Kleptocrat’s appointment to SCOTUS, this sort of thing will be revisited.

Francisco X. Alarcón was born in Wilmington, California (next to Long Beach). At age six, he moved with his family to Guadalajara, where he learned to love language by transcribing his grandmother’s ballads from Nahuatl. He returned to Los Angeles, studies at Cal State Long Beach, and then got an MA from Stanford. A Fulbright Fellowship took him to Mexico City, where he discovered Aztec incantations, and met the man he described as his soul mate, poet Elías Nandino.

All this gave Alarcón a robust poetic language to turn to topics that touched his heart.

Back in California, with two other poets, Alarcón founded Las Cuarto Espinas, the first gay Chicano poets collective. He also taught at UC Davis. When nine Chicano students chained themselves to the Arizona Capitol in protest of SB 1070, Alarcón wrote “For the Capitol Nine” to celebrate their action.

carnalitos

y carnalitas

brothers

and sisters:

from afar

we can hear

your heart beats

they are

the drums

of the Earth

our people

follow closely

your steps

as warriors

of justice

and peace

you take on

the Beast

of hatred

the unlawful

police enforcement

of discrimination

chain yourselves

to the doors

of the State Capitol

so that terror

will not leak out

to our streets

your voices

your actions

your courage

can’t be taken

way from us

and put in jail

you are nine

young warriors

like nine sky stars

you are the hope

the best dreams

of our nation

your faces

are radiant

as the Sun

they will break

this dark night

for a new day

yes, carnalitas

and carnalitos:

all our sisters

all our brothers

need no papers

to prove once

and for all

“we are humans

just like you are–

we are not criminals”

our plea comes to

“No to criminalization!

Yes to legalization!”

The Gauleiter from Alabama, currently the US Attorney General, is unlikely to grasp this message, any more than most of those in the Arizona government (including the reincarnation of Ilse Koch who sits in the governor’s mansion). Their drums are entirely different, and they drown out any sound of human heartbeats.

However, for the millions of Americans who have evolved beyond those swirling around the Kleptocrat, Alarcón’s words resonate. On his Facebook page, before he died a year ago, he welcomed other poets speaking out against SB 1070. Here’s his “Poetic Manifesto” to them, which I really, really like.

Because each poem—like each march, each act of generosity, each refusal to accept the vile nihilism that has reached out from the dark places—is indeed an act of faith, and an expression of power.

“Poetic Manifesto”
to “Poets Responding to SB 1070”

each poem
is an act of faith

in the power
of the Word

a flower passed
hand to hand

and rooted
in the heart

a prayer/chant
lightning the night

a song amid
so much noise

a murmur
of tree branches

at the very edge
of the big desert

breaking down
the borders of despair

sowing the seeds
of renewed hope

each poem is
a call for action

is saying “yes”
to the rule of “no”

a defiance
to social silence

building trust
in response to fear

a testimony
of the human soul

recognizing
that in spite all

our differences
and peculiarities

we all breathe
love and dream

celebrate and suffer
under the same one Sun

And here it is in Spanish:

cada poema
es un acto de fe

en el poder
de la Palabra

una flor cedida
de mano a mano

y enraizada
en el corazón

una oración/canto
iluminando la noche

una canción
entre tanto ruido

un murmullo
de ramas de árbol

al mero filo
del gran desierto

rompiendo las fronteras
de la desesperanza

plantando las semillas
de la renovada esperanza

cada poema
es un llamado a la acción

es decir “sí”
al régimen del “no”

un desafío
al silencio social

construyendo confianza
en respuesta al temor

un testimonio
del alma humana

reconociendo
que a pesar de todas

nuestras diferencias
y peculiaridades

todos respiramos
amamos y soñamos

celebramos y sufrimos
bajo un mismo Sol

Resistance moon: Out of the night

When you think of people who’ve played the long game, who’ve showed steadfast courage and a generosity of spirit despite the most despicable treatment from their oppressors, I believe you would not cast about too long before you spoke the name of Nelson Mandela.

In the course of his revolutionary leadership in the struggle against apartheid, Mandela was denounced as a terrorist and spent 27 years in prison, before being released in 1992 and becoming the first black president of South Africa. As we are seeing today with the white male base of the Kleptocrat’s supporters, the attempts by the Afrikaners who had held power since the days of the Dutch settlements became more and more repressive with every successive wave of black African refusal to live as second class citizens in their own land. And Mandela was the most visible representation of the African National Congress.

One of his many remarkable qualities was his refusal to carry the terrible weight of bitterness or revenge—he could certainly be remorseless, but he was not vindictive. Even though he certainly had real, personal cause for grievance.

The poem “Invictus”, is the best-known work of the Victorian poet William E. Henley. It certainly encapsulates the Victorian mantra of maintaining the stiff upper lip, but also includes that kind of, well, master-of-fate mentality that formed the backbone of the British Empire. You really do have to have an underpinning of a complete belief in yourself in order to conquer, occupy and govern peoples literally around the world.

It also helps if you’re going to lead the resistance to the kind of oppression that people like the Kleptocrat, and the Bothas.

And “Invictus” (Latin for, essentially, “unbroken”; literally, “unconquered”) was a touchstone for Mandela during his imprisonment. It has also served the same purpose for Aung San Suu Kyi, and American POWs held by the North Vietnamese, so it could do so for us, too.

“Invictus”

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeoning of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Resistance moon: Yours and yours and yours

Prior to 20 January 2017, when most people heard the word “resistance”, they probably thought “Résistance”—as in Victor Laszlo, le Maquis, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the like. So let’s have a poem today that harkens back to the big-R Resistance. The repressive regime this time around is no less dangerous than the last bout of Nazis, so seems appropriate.

When you wage war, uniformed armies with big guns are only one of your strategic components. Gathering intelligence and committing acts of sabotage are both necessary and dangerous activities, and communicating securely with your agents behind enemy lines is critical to success in both these endeavors. It’s kind of a given that if you can encrypt something, someone else can decrypt it, particularly if the cipher key you use is based on a work that’s public knowledge. Viz.: a Shakespearean sonnet or the second paragraph of page 47 of Newton’s Principia.

Leo Marks ran the cryptographer unit for Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the organization that was created at the behest of Winston Churchill for the express purpose to “set Europe ablaze”. SOE's work was vital to winning the war; there were staggering blunders, but on the whole their agents gathered valuable information that helped shape (amongst others) Operation Overlord, the invasion of France that began with D-Day.  

(BTW, as it happens, Heydrich's assassination was carried out by SOE-trained Czechs and Slovaks, in May 1942, four months after the Wannsee Conference at which the plan for the destruction of all European Jews was laid out. There's no telling how many lives that one act saved, but it did not come without cost. In addition to the assassins, more than 1300 men, women and children were murdered in reprisals.) 

Marks was the son of the co-owner of the Marks & Co. antiquarian bookshop that was featured in 84 Charing Cross Road. His interest in cryptography came at an early age when he read Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Gold Bug”. Upon being conscripted in 1942, Marks’ deciphering abilities caused him to be diverted from Bletchley Park; instead he was sent to SOE headquarters in Baker Street to devise ciphers, build out teams of cryptanalysts and train field agents. His innate curiosity and creativity, combined with a certain amount of smart-assery, led him to a number of innovations. Among them was the insight around the insecurity of any cipher based on a “public” key, so he wrote poems for his agents to memorize as keys for encrypting and decrypting messages. “The Life that I Have” was one such, actually written at Christmas 1943 about his girlfriend, who had recently died. He gave this one to Violet Szabo, the Franco-British woman who was captured on her second mission to Occupied France, tortured and executed at Ravensbrück in 1945.

This poem reminds us of the cost of redeeming nations from oppression.

“The Life that I Have”

The life that I have

Is all that I have

And the life that I have

Is yours.

The love that I have

Of the life that I have

Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have

A rest I shall have

Yet death will be but a pause.

For the peace of my years

In the long green grass

Will be yours and yours and yours.

Resistance moon: Give back your heart

Our poet for today, Derek Walcott, was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, and raised by a widowed mother as a Methodist in a Catholic-dominated culture. His first published poem, at age 14, elicited a condemnation as blasphemous from a Catholic priest. He studied in Kingston, Jamaica, and then moved to Trinidad, becoming a critic, teacher and journalist. A job teaching at Boston University brought him to the United States, where he won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the “genius grant”); he also received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

In “Love after Love”, he references spirituality (especially in the second stanza), but I’ve included it in this month’s collection because the poet advises us to create within ourselves, each of us, the building blocks of strength that will form the foundation of resistance. He may be speaking of recovery from a love affair, but he could also be speaking of learning to love oneself, without which there can be no love of other, or love of principle.

(In fact—when you think about it, those who claim to love principle without that underlying sense of care for self, are pretty much the ones who take us all down. They substitute the abstract for the particular and have no empathy at all.)

"Love after Love"

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Resistance moon: Wild Rebels

Like the Jews and the Chinese, the Irish have some experience with resistance, rebellion and resilience. We have learned, of a necessity, to play the long game, although I’m thinking that it’s not really natural.

(Something just occurred to me: a colleague of mine, a Jew, once told me that the entire history of Jewish holidays is contained in this sentence: “They tried to kill us; we won; let’s eat.” The Irish equivalent would be something like, “We rebelled against the Sassenach; they won, but it’s temporary; let’s drink and sing.” Not quite the punch, but…)

Jokes aside, the history of the British occupation of Ireland is both sad and vicious. G.K. Chesterton (an Englishman) famously said, “The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad.” The sadness would also apply to Irish poetry, since so much of it is about that history. Ireland was essentially England’s first colony, and it’s her last one. Of course all the arts will reflect that.

In the past I’ve given you Seamus Heaney’s “Requiem for the Croppies”, with its heartbreaking image of the barley growing from their graves. And the classic example is Yeats’s “Easter 1916”; pretty much everyone knows the last line. This time round, let’s have something from a lesser-known poet.

Eva Gore-Booth was the sister of the revolutionary Constance, Countess Markievicz. Markievicz was an active participant in the Easter Rising in 1916—a rifle-wielding commander of the Irish Citizen Army. Following the surrender to the British, she was held in solitary confinement at Kilmainham Gaol. She was sentenced to death, along with the other leaders, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because of her sex. She served only a year, and was elected to Parliament—the first woman ever—although she declined to serve.

Gore-Booth was two years younger than Constance. Like her older sister she was a suffragist and activist on behalf of labor rights. Unlike her sister, she was a pacifist and a social reformer. Yeats himself was an admirer of her poetry. In “Comrades”, she skips over the violence that brought these men and women to their prison, and instead speaks of how night and its cover unify those behind bars with those who are free. It’s another perspective on the everlasting struggle.

“Comrades”

The peaceful night that round me flows,

Breaks through your iron prison doors,

Free through the world your spirit goes,

Forbidden hands are clasping yours.

The wind is our confederate,

The night has left her doors ajar,

We meet beyond earth’s barred gate,

Where all the world’s wild Rebels are.

Gratitude Monday: Haiku strong

Well—it’s Gratitude Monday. And Patriots’ Day. And National Haiku Day. So I’m grateful for a couple of things.

The Boston Marathon will be run (and, in some cases, staggered) today, as it has every Patriots’ Day for 120 years. There will be more security than there used to be, thanks both to the Tsarnaev brothers’ terrorist attack four years ago, and the general unease surrounding any kind of event under the current administration. (You just never know when thugs will show up to wave Confederate or Nazi flags in the faces of people celebrating everything from a kid’s birthday party to a major sporting event.) But half a million people will show up to cheer 30,000 runners all 26 miles through the greater metropolitan area.

And before we get an unpresidented tweet taking credit for it—they were #BostonStrong long before the Kleptocrat ran for office.

I’m also grateful for the haiku that a friend of mine has been posting to Facebook every day for National Poetry Month, even while en route to and on his spring break. This is true dedication.

Of course, he is Irish…

But out of gratitude, and in his honor, here’s my poor contribution.

Mahoney’s haiku

Remind me of pub lunch breaks—

Ah, those happy times

What do you have in your poetry and gratitude pocket?

Resistance moon: Three letters that you will not get

In yesterday’s poem, Lawrence Ferlinghetti did a powerful lot of waiting. Historically, women have done a lot of that—laboring quietly at home (work that, per se, is often only noticed when it doesn’t for some reason get done) and waiting for the outcome of the Big Events that we’re told only men can produce.

Like enjoying the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake ever while ordering the firing of 59 missiles on…one of those countries in the Middle East that are so easy to confuse when boasting to a bimbo. (And how idiotic do you have to be when the otherwise fawning bimbo corrects you?) After all—Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan; sooner or later the Kleptocrat will get around to killing their citizens bigly because he’s learned the lesson that doing so gives him a bump in his approval ratings and deflects for a news cycle or two from investigations into his and his Gauleiters’ dealings with Russians. So if he misspeaks “Iraq” for “Syria” this time, meh—wait a week or so and he’ll be right.

Oh, I digress.

If you’ve ever listened to Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam as was) sing “Morning Has Broken” (or been surprised to find the song in your church hymnal), then you’re familiar with Eleanor Farjeon, an English poet, journalist and writer of children’s books. Farjeon came from a late Victorian literary family, and counted among her friends D.H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and Robert Frost (who lived for some time in England until World War I broke out). One of her closest friendships was with the poet Edward Thomas and his wife Helen.

On Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, Thomas was killed in his first action, at Arras. Farjeon wrote a poem that captures that instant when we at home learn that the one at war has paid the highest price for policy. The tiniest of things are etched eternally into our memories, some to bring a glimmer of joy, others an unexpected rush of tears. Sometimes for the rest of our lives.

“Easter Monday”

(In Memoriam E.T.)

In the last letter that I had from France
You thanked me for the silver Easter egg
Which I had hidden in the box of apples

You like to munch beyond all other fruit.

You found the egg the Monday before Easter,

And said. ‘I will praise Easter Monday now –

It was such a lovely morning’. Then you spoke

Of the coming battle and said, ‘This is the eve.

‘Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon’.

That Easter Monday was a day for praise,

It was such a lovely morning. In our garden

We sowed our earliest seeds, and in the orchard

The apple-bud was ripe. It was the eve,

There are three letters that you will not get.

Resistance moon: The rebirth of wonder

Χριστός Ανέστη

On Easter we should have something about resurrection, about rebirth. And I realize that we’ve not had anything at all from the Beat poets. Mostly, perhaps, because these guys do tend to drone on. But during a time of extraordinary conformity, the Beats were consummate resisters, so…yeah.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti earned a masters degree in English literature at Columbia University on the GI Bill after World War II. (The current administration and its Repugnant collaborators in Congress do not believe we owe our uniformed services anything once they’ve left the field. Shoot, they don’t believe in education for any citizens.) He then went on to study at the Sorbonne and eventually ended up in San Francisco, where he was a founding member of the Beat movement.

He’s also a painter, so here’s a self-portrait he did.

For today, “I am waiting” covers a lot of material—a lot of it bad, really bad. And you have to inquire why he’s waiting, rather than doing. But, although Ferlinghetti is indeed an activist, here he’s a poet, and he’s enumerating the things that need redress.

But he’s also hopeful—the repetition of the rebirth of wonder. So let’s take that with us today.

“I am waiting”

I am waiting for my case to come up   

and I am waiting

for a rebirth of wonder

and I am waiting for someone

to really discover America

and wail

and I am waiting   

for the discovery

of a new symbolic western frontier   

and I am waiting   

for the American Eagle

to really spread its wings

and straighten up and fly right

and I am waiting

for the Age of Anxiety

to drop dead

and I am waiting

for the war to be fought

which will make the world safe

for anarchy

and I am waiting

for the final withering away

of all governments

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming   

and I am waiting

for a religious revival

to sweep thru the state of Arizona   

and I am waiting

for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored   

and I am waiting

for them to prove

that God is really American

and I am waiting

to see God on television

piped onto church altars

if only they can find   

the right channel   

to tune in on

and I am waiting

for the Last Supper to be served again

with a strange new appetizer

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called

and I am waiting

for the Salvation Army to take over

and I am waiting

for the meek to be blessed

and inherit the earth   

without taxes

and I am waiting

for forests and animals

to reclaim the earth as theirs

and I am waiting

for a way to be devised

to destroy all nationalisms

without killing anybody

and I am waiting

for linnets and planets to fall like rain

and I am waiting for lovers and weepers

to lie down together again

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed   

and I am anxiously waiting

for the secret of eternal life to be discovered   

by an obscure general practitioner

and I am waiting

for the storms of life

to be over

and I am waiting

to set sail for happiness

and I am waiting

for a reconstructed Mayflower

to reach America

with its picture story and tv rights

sold in advance to the natives

and I am waiting

for the lost music to sound again

in the Lost Continent

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day

that maketh all things clear

and I am awaiting retribution

for what America did   

to Tom Sawyer   

and I am waiting

for Alice in Wonderland

to retransmit to me

her total dream of innocence

and I am waiting

for Childe Roland to come

to the final darkest tower

and I am waiting   

for Aphrodite

to grow live arms

at a final disarmament conference

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting

to get some intimations

of immortality

by recollecting my early childhood

and I am waiting

for the green mornings to come again   

youth’s dumb green fields come back again

and I am waiting

for some strains of unpremeditated art

to shake my typewriter

and I am waiting to write

the great indelible poem

and I am waiting

for the last long careless rapture

and I am perpetually waiting

for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn   

to catch each other up at last

and embrace

and I am awaiting   

perpetually and forever

a renaissance of wonder