Ancestors

Toot

Written by Passenger on 2025-01-01 at 08:34

What follows is a new years tradition for me. This is a poem that speaks to me more every year, and tells me about the future that we can build, that we must build: that there is no hope without revolution, because revolution and hope are the same thing.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from passenger@kolektiva.social

Descendants

Written by Passenger on 2025-01-01 at 08:36

Imagine the Angels of Bread

by Martín Espada

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,

gazing like admirals from the rail of the roofdeck

or levitating hands in praise of steam in the shower;

this is the year

that shawled refugees deport judges,

who stare at the floor

and their swollen feet

as files are stamped

with their destination;

this is the year that police revolvers,

stove-hot, blister the fingers

of raging cops,

and nightsticks splinter

in their palms;

this is the year

that darkskinned men

lynched a century ago

return to sip coffee quietly

with the apologizing descendants

of their executioners.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from passenger@kolektiva.social

Written by Passenger on 2025-01-01 at 08:36

This is the year that those

who swim the border’s undertow

and shiver in boxcars

are greeted with trumpets and drums

at the first railroad crossing

on the other side;

this is the year that the hands

pulling tomatoes from the vine

uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,

the hands canning tomatoes

are named in the will that owns

the bedlam of the cannery;

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from passenger@kolektiva.social

Written by Passenger on 2025-01-01 at 08:36

this is the year that the eyes

stinging from the poison that purifies toilets

awaken at last to the sight

of a rooster-loud hillside,

pilgrimage of immigrant birth;

this is the year that cockroaches

become extinct, that no doctor

finds a roach embedded

in the ear of an infant;

this is the year that the food stamps

of adolescent mothers

are auctioned like gold doubloons,

and no coin is given to buy machetes

for the next bouquet of severed heads

in coffee plantation country.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from passenger@kolektiva.social

Written by Passenger on 2025-01-01 at 08:37

If the abolition of slave-manacles

began as a vision of hands without manacles,

then this is the year;

if the shutdown of extermination camps

began as imagination of a land

without barbed wire or the crematorium,

then this is the year;

if every rebellion begins with the idea

that conquerors on horseback

are not many-legged gods, that they too drown

if plunged in the river,

then this is the year.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from passenger@kolektiva.social

Written by Passenger on 2025-01-01 at 08:37

So may every humiliated mouth,

teeth like desecrated headstones,

fill with the angels of bread.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from passenger@kolektiva.social

Written by Andii אַנדִֽי on 2025-01-01 at 09:02

@passenger

Thank you for sharing this. I'd never before seen it and I love it.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Andii@mas.to