| Aurora Levins
Morales USA
Baghdad Birthday Someday a thousand children of Baghdad will ask why they all have the same deadly birthday, why they all came into the world on the last day of peace, and their mothers will tell how they raced against the calendar of war, how they crowded into hospitals demanding labor demanding to start the clocks of their bodies as the planes took off from bases half a world away. The will say that they rode wave after wave of contractions as the targeting systems honed in on everyday life, how they bore down and pushed while nurses and doctors rushed around trying to prepare, without supplies, without medicine, for shrapnel wounds and broken bones, for everything torn and shattered and burned for the shocked and wailing people who would have the next turn to lie these beds crowded into hallways, how you crowned as the moon rose over the river. You were born, they will tell them, into the last quiet hour such a small chest, such little legs, arriving weeks before your time, and I hid your tiny face in my swollen breast so the terrible fire wouldn't scorch your tender eyes. Your first lullabye, they will say, was when I sang you my grandmother's song and the second was the screaming of missiles ripping low across the city, and then came the shockwaves and everything was falling. My darling, my dove, you were born in the nick of time. We left the hospital to the wounded who kept coming, the mothers will say, to the little girl in her father's arms, blood leaking from her ears to the woman clutching her boy, both of them full of metal splinters, and we walked until we found our street with the houses still standing. The walls shook around us, the windows shattered, the dreadful wind knocked dishes from the shelves, and we covered your ears against the roaring sky. The first night of your lives we lay down in our beds and held you a thousand moist sweet unfurling rosebuds forced into early bloom a thousand passengers on a single train running on the timetable of death set by criminals lusting for conquest in their air conditioned rooms. A thousand roses opening just before dawn, a thousand babies born alive in the teeth of invasion, a thousand thorny branches amidst the smoke yes, we snatched you from the dark and the body counts and pulled you into a world on fire and the smell of burning. We were afraid and we were strong and we were trembling, all around us Baghdad was dying but remember this, when you crowned between our legs we were singing. Wings
Cuba y Puerto Rico son Cuba and Puerto Rico
de un pájaro las dos alas. are the two wings of one bird,
Reciben flores y balas receiving flowers and bullets
en el mismo corazon. into the same heart.
Lola Rodriguez de Tió
Two wings of one bird, said the exiled poet whose words burned too many holes of truth through the colonial air of a different iron-toothed occupation. Nothing divides the suffering of the conquered. Two wings, she said, of a single bird, with one heart between them, taking bullets and roses, soldiers and prison bars and poetry, into one pulse of protest. One bird she insisted as the ship pulled away from San Juan headed for Havana, 1879. A century later we are still the wounded wing, fluttering, dragged through the waves, another empire plucking feathers from living flesh. White egret among the foam, cried the poet, returning after long years in the dry solitude of Spain: garza, garza blanca. Those ruffled reefs are infested now with unexploded bombs. Pastures where white birds still grace the backs of cattle, are dusted with the toxic waste of rehearsal for invasion, that seeps into the blood of children, so that cancer is a required course in the highschools of Vieques, giving a whole new meaning to the term "drop out". I was born into an occupied country. I am that wing. What kind of Jew are you, receiving bullets and roses as if in a Palestinian heart? I am the Jewish great-great-grandaughter of Puerto Rican slaveholders. I am the Puerto Rican great-great-grandaughter of Ukrainian socialists. I am the surviving branch of a family tree split at the turn of the last century holding the photograph of nameless cousins who missed the last train to Siberia and fell into the trenches of summer as Nazi armies rolled across the farmlands of Kherson. I am the educated grandaughter of a Puerto Rican seamstress who never went past the eighth grade, whose fingers bled into the spandex of sweatshop assembly line girdles, a long subway ride from the barrios where she lived, the grandaughter of an electrician wiring battleships in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, of a communist studying law at night and serving deli by day, and of a social worker trying to plug the holes in immigrant lifeboats. I am a daughter of occupation and conquest, of deportation and escape. I am a daughter of people who were outgunned and refused to die. I am a colonial subject with a stone in my hand when I listen to the news. I am a fierce Latina Jew holding out a rose to Palestine. I am the Jewish grand-niece of a Puerto Rican WWII soldier cracking up in the bloody Pacific in the service of an army that always sent the brown men in first. I am the Puerto Rican cousin of Jewish evacuees trying to flee eastward, shot in the back by Ukrainian collaborators who lived just down the road. I am the daughter of red pacifists married in the year of Korea, a two-winged child conceived as the Rosenbergs died, born as Lolita was shackled into her quarter century of punishment for shooting into the air. I was born Jewish in an occupied Caribbean land, speaking Spanish with the accent of escaped slaves and hungry coffee laborers, because my great-grandfather would not fight Japan for the Tsar, because he evaded yet another imperial draft, and washed up in New York City where barrio meets shtetl, girl meets boy and solidarity was my lullabye. What kind of independentista are you, to weep for Israeli soldiers drafted into accepting atrocity as a fact of life, beating out the ritmo of kaddish for colonialists wrongfully killed in rightful revolution on the conga of your caribe heart? I am the proud cousin of a banned Boricua writer climbing out of his deathbed to raise the flag of Puerto Rico on the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion, just two weeks before he died of tb contracted in the bitter prison cells of Valladolid. I am a distant relative of the first woman of Puerto Rico burned by the Inquisition in the name of Christ, for being a secret Jew. I am the descendant of hacendados who worked their own slave children to the bone in tobacco fields ripening over the traces of uprooted plantings of casabe and of the pale brown daughters of dark women, taken into the marriage beds of landholding men, criada servants deemed good enough for younger sons, setting their wide cheeks and mouths into their children's bones. I am the descendant of invaders and invaded, now riding high on history's wheel, now crushed below, of those evicted and their village burned, of those who rode the horses and set the flames. What kind of song is this? Whose side are you on? Two wings, I say with the exiled poets of my country to my disposessed and disposessing cousins in the land it seems that everyone was promised. Two wings with a single heart between them: intifada and partisaner, refusnik and cimarron. Nothing divides the suffering. One bird full of bullets and roses, one bird with its wounded pinions, one heart that if it breaks is broken. I know there are two bloody wings, but it is one bird trying to lift itself into the air, one bird turning in circles on the ground, because two wings rising and falling together, is the forgotten principle of flight. Two wings torn by tempestuous weather. One bird struggling into the light. Memorial In my grandmother's village there were no olive groves. When the soldiers came, it was through fields of wheat that the children ran, and my young cousins bloomed like a sudden crop of red poppies among the pale stalks. August, 1941. Among the crimes of war, what a tiny handful of deaths that was, twenty children of Israelevka, murdered by Ukrainian men in a wheatfield, on a summer day, their eyes open, looking, the way children look. I carry their wide gazes like a pocketful of pebbles, small stones of grief snatched from an avalanche of suffering. But my cousins keep multiplying on the stony ground, while crazed men, hoarse from shouting at each other pretend it is safety they are buying in the marketplace of slaughter. My cousins lie in bruised heaps like roughly handled plums, shatter on ordinary street corners, are shot, just like that, simply for being, bleed to death slowly, thirsty, barricaded from help. My throat fills with the cries of Rivka, Avram, Gitl falling in the blonde grass of more than half a century ago, wide eyes gazing across time, watching their own deaths repeated, their anguished voices calling help them! and seeing stones in the eyes of their could have been sons, the same brutal gestures the same crumpled dress, stained shirt, small corpse. Shake out the pebbles from your pockets, they tell me. Grief is grief. The earth is littered with it. Each child lying in her blood is a universe ended. Hassan, Salah, Jameel. They were galaxies that will not return. Hope is always ridiculous, say the murdered children. Don't be reasonable anymore, they shout, angrily. Don't just stand there grieving. Your heart is still beating. it's not too late. Frightened Children For Barbara Lubin & Penny Rosenwasser The children who lie down to sleep in Kabul and Pandahar and Jalalabad, the children in truck convoys and on foot, making their desperate way from rubble to starvation, the children who lie down to sleep in cardboard shacks in Islamabad, the children who lie down to sleep under the banner "and those who harbor them" do not sleep. Smiling coldly the mouthpieces of generals explain their incompetence. We thought the Red Cross building was the refuge of terrorists. We thought the ambulances were hiding bin Laden. We thought the caravan of refugees had anti-aircraft guns. We thought the village was a military camp. You have to expect some collateral damage. Collateral damage has a name and her name is Anahita collateral damage's name is Tahir He was eight, she was eleven. They died under a whistling rain of weapons that opened in the air and ripped and burrowed into their bodies until they were not bodies. They died when the building collapsed from too many years of war, too many cracks, one more bomb. They died running into a minefield for packages of alien food dropped by a benevolent nation. The children who have not yet died of bombs or falling buildings, the children who have not yet died of machine gun bullets swarming through their street devouring lives, who have not yet died of thirst, the children who have not yet died of nothing to eat and no medicine do not sleep. They pee on themselves at every loud sound and every ominous silence. They doze and wake up screaming at nightmares of dark hurtling shapes screeching toward everyone they love. They lie trembling in the dark and will not let go of someone's sleeve, whimper and stare wide eyed, sob and stutter and bury their heads under pillows. They are afraid of the sky. Do not send any more dollar bills from your piggy banks to the White House. Afghani children do not want peanut butter. They want their sisters back. They want back their fathers and mothers. They want their infinite cousins to come back from the place of blood and shredded garments. They want their playmates back from under the piles of stones. It is simple. They want their mother singing as she makes bread. They want the houses to stand up again. They want the sky. "Baghdad Birthday" appeared in Shock and Awe: Response to War (Creative Arts Book Company, 2003) All poems © Copyright, Aurora Levins Morales. All these poems were first read on Pacifica Radio's Flashpoints, which can be heard at www.flashpoints.net. |
