I only recognized your hair: short,
neatly combed. Our mother
would’ ve been proud.
In the Sonoran desert
your body became a slaughter-
house where faith and want were stunned,
hung upside down, gutted. We
were taught
to bring roses, to aim for the bush. Remember?
You tried to pork
a girl’ s armpit. In Border Patrol
jargon, the word
....................... hello hello hello ... Weiwei ... where have you been? ... I see you in dreams ... bleeding ... in the darkness of the sun ... 81 spots in the flame ... each a nightmare one cannot wake up from ... Weiwei ... the last son ... you told me as we said goodbye ... your last night on the Lower East Side ... 未未 ... the last child of your Mother and Father ... born in the labor camp ... exiled from Beijing to the far desert ... watching your Father clean public latrines for singing the truth
I’ ve come to this one grassy hill
in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street,
to place a few red anemones
& a sheaf of wheat on Darwish’ s grave.
A borrowed line transported me beneath
a Babylonian moon & I found myself
lucky to have the shadow of a coat
as warmth, listening to a poet’ s song
of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string
Caesar stole off Gilgamesh’ s lute.
I know a prison of sunlight on the skin.
The land I come from they also dreamt
before they arrived in towering ships
LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore,
awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him:
for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve,
till before him the folk, both far and near,
who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate,
gave him gifts: a good king he!
To him an heir was afterward born,
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
And if all those who meet or even
hear of you become witness to what you are —
a white country of blight beneath the last snows of
spring. Could we remain quiet on earth
and bear it, the war we make inside
what is — it’ s a long time to be here, to be still,
to feel the rot inside now — bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars
at the edge of a field where we are once again
taken from ourselves. Could we remain here,
witness to grief, one last bright dire call-and-reply,
Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?
Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?
List to the yarn, as my grandmother’ s father the sailor told it to me.
Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)
His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be;
Along the lower’ d eve he came horribly raking us.
We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’ d,
My captain lash’ d fast with his own hands.
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil’ d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
Till after midnight glimmer upon us the lights of a dim-lighted building,
We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building,
’ Tis a large old church at the crossing roads, now an impromptu hospital
Entering but for a minute I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made,
Come up from the fields father, here’ s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’ s a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, ’ tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’ s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’ d vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’ d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
