Election Day, 2008
(dedicated to Lauren Johnson who one day after being released from a NYC hospital in fragile condition waited in line to vote and to the People who joined her in taking back our country)

The noise is back.
Amen!
The ground has risen up
to meet our dancing.
Drum skins live again:
goat, sheep
together sing,
we slap the drum
awake
with new hands;
ancestors rejoice
with the living.
The Master’s house
has burned to the ground
we dip fingers
into the ashes
of histories
we must never forget.
Taste.
Remember.

The noise is back.
Amen!
No more droning cities.
No more dangerous silence.
New voices
crackle flame
into the flabby belly
of old darkness.
Life tastes good again.

This day must last.
This day must live.
It cannot live alone.
Breathe deep. Hold. Exhale.
Tomorrow we start again.
The gathering:
The tears of Jesse Jackson.
The grandmother prophet
who died knowing
without being told.
The buses that shouted
and laughed as they rolled.

Hammers glisten
with readiness
in the worker’s hands.
That first vote,
like first love.
Never forgotten.
Thank you, my country,
thank you
the young,
the old,
the sick,
with lacerated hearts
who shook the lethargy
of pain,
unwrapped the shroud
of malaise
moved through
the fever of fear,
the temptation of despair,
left the safety
of their beds,
untwisted the knots
of endless grief
to comfort a broken liberty.
The lessons of faith
and action,
that hope is never enough.
Thank you,
my country,
for not sleeping
on the day
of war.
With voice, with song,
with truth the blade
that cut the lie
you moved, at last.
The Master’s house
is being rebuilt.
The Master
drags his shame
like a torn flag,
his name erased
from the annals
of love,
ripped from the archive
of decency.
Every hand to a brick,
every voice to the mortar,
every eye
a window of vigilance.
Peace has a price
and freedom
demands
noise.
The noise is back.
Amen!

Oh, joyful, noise,
we have found you
our aching love,
our beautiful, ferocious hunger,
satisfied by fire.
No more flabby belly of darkness.
We make ourselves strong for you.
We will never let you go.
We will hold you close.
Yes, we can.

The noise is back.
Amen!

Magdalena Gómez
Copyright, 2008

The Broken Electoral Process

  Last night I dreamt of a giant fisherman looming over a lake.  Holding his fishing rod with both hands he stood motionless, while a man in a suit controlled the fish with a Gameboy.  The fisherman had to do nothing but wait for the fish to be lured onto the hook. I woke up catching my breath, mouth sore, body flailing.

  Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke tells us that if we don’t follow the Bush bailout plan, the country will enter a recession.  Has this thug been in a coma?  The USA is already in a depression and the food pantries are empty.  There will be no bread for the breadline, only syringes of false hope shooting us up as we sleep. A bailout will secure golden parachutes for the rich stitched by the already broken fingers of workers, as we The People huddle in the toilet bowl of the Oval Office complacently waiting for our reward.  Some of us moan and wait for our heavenly reward as we permit the devil to run free.  The hoof print digs into every family facing foreclosure, into every person denied health care for lack of money, into every school drop-out who can no longer breathe the foul air of education by rote, into every poor person, undocumented person and the babies in jail for smoking a joint or stealing a steak.  Katrina victims had to bail out their own way to safety, let these wealthy assassins of economic justice grab a bucket and do the same.  The rich have their Jesus, their savior, and we The People are left with Barabbas.  We have been bribed once again to set him free, as Roman soldiers bribed the masses to make sure the loud mouth Jewish revolutionary who unmasked the unjust was silenced. Judas swings in the wind in the decency of remorse.  Jesus, a Jewish political prisoner of war, left to rot in midday sun, is now used as a human shield against the very people and values he died for – the just, the forgotten, the oppressed, regardless of their social standing.  I am a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Pagan.  A spiritual freak detached from all flags reaching for God in the invisible prayer that is lived, not spoken.  Where is the one who dares to speak the truth even if it means political suicide?  Where is Judas full of remorse and shame, giving up the safety of darkness and hanging in the midday sun beside his comrade, in effigy to the truth of events?

 

McCain is dotty-he did a 360 at the convention to find Palin who was standing next to him.  Palin parades her pregnant, unmarried daughter like a trophy in the “Pro-life” olympics, and Obama’s speeches are making me yawn.  Cheered on by his wife, Michelle, the only one I trust to have some spine in this whole mess, Senator Obama occasionally glistens with rehearsed truth, tempering his authentic and passionate voice to be the “safe” Black man who gets along just fine with white folks. I will vote for Senator Obama, knowing there is a fire within, as he bides time and circumstance.  However, that monotone apologia of a video that opened his convention acceptance speech must have been shot and edited by his enemies, not his supporters. Lackluster, unimaginative and playing to the lowest common denominator of the dominant culture of white-ness.  My only hope is that he didn’t see it or approve it.  I want to believe.

 

I still do believe in the electoral process.  My candidate is YOU. You who are weary and yearning to be free, you who know that a corporate-run government is not a viable option if our minds, our hearts, the planet on which we are guests are to survive.  You who are not afraid to be a loud mouth or unpopular, you who are not afraid to grab a wooden spoon and metal pot and invade the streets with loud, articulate, imaginative resistance.  You who will not pander, you who will not join the legion of power hungry sycophants feverishly campaigning, voting, only to then turn over power to the Gameboy fisherman.  I believe in you who will lay awake, awaiting his return defile your dreams and drown his tyranny as the Taíno cacique, Agüeybana the II drowned Diego Salcedo in the Guaorabo river.

 

“Only in this way do men become men:

fighting day and night to be men.”

-Otto Rene Castillo

 

Regardless of who becomes President of the United Corporate States of America, either the fisherman will manipulate the fish do his bidding, or the fish will outsmart him and he will be left standing, limp rod in hand.  Regardless of who takes office, you are the invisible candidate I am counting on to take back our country.