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in memory of Oscar Romero
Not to the blue fuses do I knuckle.
Not to boys’ muses — their sly kites,
skylighters loosing fire, without sweep or buckle,
onto a landscape so that they may blight
its hills and gardens into history. Or myth.
Not to these do I bow; not to the might
in a sibilant, the judge who hears one say shibboleth,
another say sibboleth, and knows, by accent, which to slaughter
(even though translators can’t grasp that glyph —
if it means corn, or flood, or if it matters
to anyone, save the drawling Ephraimites’ lines);
and not to those who barter daughters
for armor or for spoils, who fold paper cranes —
those charms — from torn benedictions.
Not to such do I cede, but to these dangers: to the stones
hoarsely flinging requiem and jubilation;
to a rabbi weeping into his sleeves;
to women marching past the degradation
that the grave is not and singing from the eaves
with a prophet’s clap and spin; to the famed
doubter’s hands, full, the moment he believes.
To the far-sighted priest stammering every name
of the disappeared — ¡presente! — like it’s
his own,
because it is: because I was taken, aflame,
inside the stem to a place where atoms moan
in whirling congregations, where the tree’s coarse
green hem is for the healing of the nations. Flown,
it was in the core and pith, the cells’ recourse,
that I found love: I was forced.
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