Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Martín Espada
45 years old
Amherst, MA
Martín Espada is the author of seven poetry collections, including Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002 (Norton).
Ghazal for Open Hands
in memory of Agha Shahid Ali December 10, 2001 Northampton, Massachusetts
The imam stands above your grave to pray with open hands, cupping your spirit like grain in the palms of these open hands.
Poet of Kashmir, the graveyard lathers my shoes with mud as the imam calls to Islam's God and lifts his open hands.
Ghazal-maker, your pine box sinks into a cumulus of snow, red earth thumping on the coffin, dropped from open hands.
There are some today who murmur of the cancer in your brain but do not know the words for speaking to Allah with open hands.
We listen to Islamic prayers at the cemetery, as we pay for bombs to blossom into graves in places where they pray with open hands.
Far from here, the bombs we bless are tumbling down in loaves of steel to tear away the fingers from their hungry open hands.
Shahid, your grave multiplies wild as cancer cells across Afghani earth, countless prayers reverberating in the well of the throat, in open hands.
I cannot scrape off the mud choking my shoes or blink away the vision of reaching into the hole for you, my hands open to your open hands.
Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center
Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye, a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, the harbor of pirates centuries ago. Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea. Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua, for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes. Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium. Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations: Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh. Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning, where the gas burned blue on every stove and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers, hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans. Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime of his dishes and silverware in the tub. Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher who worked that morning because another dishwasher could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs. Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.
After the thunder wilder than thunder, after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows, after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs, after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen, for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo, like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face, soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations across the night sky of this city and cities to come. Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.
Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue: Teach me to dance. We have no music here. And the other said with a Spanish tongue: I will teach you. Music is all we have.
Blues for the Soldiers Who Told You
"I'm like a country who can't remember the last war." Doug Anderson
They told you that the enemy and the liberated throng swaddle themselves in the same robes and rags, wear the same masks with eyes that follow you, pray in the same bewildering tongue, until your rifle trembles to rake the faces at every checkpoint. They told you about the corpse of a boy or girl rolled at your feet, hair gray with the powder of rubble and bombardment, flies a whirlpool blackening both eyes, said you¹ll learn the words for apology too late to join the ceremony, as flies become the chorus of your nightmares. They told you about the double amputee from your town, legs lopped off by the blast, his basketball friend bumping home in a flag-draped coffin the cameras will not film anymore, about veterans who drench themselves in liquor like monks pouring gasoline on their heads.
They told you in poems and stories you did not read, or stopped reading as your cheeks scorched with inexplicable fever, and because they spoke with a clarity that burned your face, because they saw with the vision of a telescope revolving around the earth, they spent years wandering through jails and bars, exiled to roads after midnight where gas stations snap their lights off one by one, seers unseen at the coffee shop waiting for bacon and eggs, calling at 3 AM to say I can¹t stop writing and you have to hear this. You will not hear this, even after the war is over and the troops drown in a monsoon of desert flowers tossed by the crowd, blooming in their mouths to stop their tongues with the sweetness of it.
The God of the Weatherbeaten Face
The God of the Weatherbeaten Face For Camilo Mejia, conscientious objector
The gods gathered: the crusader god took off his helmet, the desert warrior god stood his shield in the corner, the sword-maker god sat between them sharpening blades, the bombardier god spread his maps on the table, the god who collects infidel heads traded trophies with the god who collects heathen scalps, the god of gold opened his handkerchief for the god of oil to wipe his dripping chin, the god who punishes sin with boils scratched his boils and called the meeting to order.
And the gods said: War.
Sergeant Mejia heard the prisoner moan under the hood as the guards shoved him into a steel closet, then pounded with a sledgehammer on the door until the moaning stopped; heard machine gun fire slicing heads from necks with a roar that would be the envy of swords; heard a soldier sobbing in the toilet for the headless boy who would open his eyes every time the soldier closed his own.
Sometimes a song drifts up through the moaning and sledgehammers, machineguns and sobbing. Sometimes a voice floats above pandemonium the way a seagull floats over burning ships. Sergeant Mejia heard his father's song, the peasant mass of Nicaragua: Vos sos el Dios de los pobres, el Dios humano y sencillo, el Dios que suda en la calle, el Dios de rostro curtido. You are the God of the poor, the human and simple God, the God who sweats in the street, the God of the weatherbeaten face.
Iraq was crowded with the faces of this God. They watched as Sergeant Mejia said no to the other gods, miniscule word, a pebble, a grain of rice, but the word flipped the table at the war council, where the bombardier god had just dealt the last hand to the god of oil, and cards with dates of birth and death, like tiny tombstones, fluttered away. Sergeant no more, Camilo Mejia walked to jail. Commanders fed the word coward to the sniffing microphones of reporters who repeated obediently: coward.
The cell crowded with faces too, unseen travelers wandering in from a century of jails: union organizer, hunger striker, freedom rider, street corner agitator, conscientious objector.
The God of the weatherbeaten face, dressed as an inmate steering a mop, smuggled in the key one day, and Camilo Mejia walked with him through epiphany's gate.
