The beautiful faces of the people in the streets, those who poured out of buses, the young who voted for the first time and all who took charge, resisted despair and made a choice, kept me awake last night with joy.  This  poem is for all of you. 

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