Self-Immolation

When I find myself resenting
That bipedal scourge: doubt,

I recall the Buddhist monk,
Saigon, 1963,
who in the busy thoroughfare,
With help from his robed brothers,
Solemnly doused himself with gasoline,
Silently, lit the match.

What could he do?
No gun, words, or vote?

He could sacrifice his mantle of tranquility.
"Drape this over the stooped and gently shaking shoulders of my shackled race.
I will not enter Nirvana until all things have been liberated.
I will take this cup."

A bold step into the ranks of the suffering,
Interrupting the cocktail conversations
of the cloistered, serene in our bored frivolity,
Living for our paper hats and cha-cha lines.

And then I see:
I too can set myself on fire,
Ignite myself with untoward knowledge,
Succumb to the solitary flames of impolite fact.

I can sacrifice my mantle of tranquility, crying out
"I have doubts! I don't know!"
In this, I abandon the intention of proselytization,
For in that I seek but my own vindication.
Instead I will make new magic: my intention
Is to love that which has been neglected,
To reconcile that which has been fractured,
Which I can do best with my gun unloaded,
My mouth closed,
My interests shelved,
But hands and feet moving,
Heart and mind in flames.

Today, we too can take this cup.

Untitled

Weathered old man, I study his type:
The Automaton.

Creaking and clicking into his seat within the chanting Mass.
But no – his soul decries his context.

Don’t waste your sympathetic smiles;
What need has he for your instruction, Voltaire?
What unfamiliar lesson could you teach him, Diderot?
Gaia is teacher and muse.
What you have detailed in sundry volumes of high and mighty word,
He inauspiciously gives living form, under her discerning eye.

At your invitation to the perfumed salon, a polite declination:
“No, thank you, I ought to get back. Horses ha’int been fed.”

He sees his smallness, taught him by a life wrestling the earth.
He knows his fallibility, taught him by solitary, dawn-lit walks home after weary nights spent by the side of a dying calf.
He understands life, its instrumental purpose, taught him by solemn slaughterings and his own broken body.

He sees his smallness; I see a crown of humility.
He knows his fallibility, and so keeps his sword of judgment sheathed.
He understands the instrumental purpose of life, and so mocks the approaching dragon,
Death.

He touches my arm and tells me my skin is beautiful and brown like my mother’s
And that my heart knows best,
And I remember blackberries so ripe they could be gathered with concentrated breath;
I remember the tulips, my compass, every spring returning to spell out our heritage;
I remember racing -- downy legs on hot horseflesh -- through tobacco fields toward the place where copper clouds meet Kentucky bluegrass;
I remember the land, something so secure – something that will outlast us both,
Enduring despite our limitations, our forgetfulness.
Line by line, I see the impression of his soil-stained hands on my heart.
I see us on different sides of the semantic chasm, bridge-building, plank by tender plank.
As we cry together, understanding the misunderstood.

The Massacre One Morning Of The Ancestors

We arrive on our spaceships
Highest of hopes and good intentions
We plant our gardens vast and green
Harvest our grapes and olives and corn
We build our cities tall and white
Stretch out the road, through land and space
Pointing -- "Hark, the promise of it!"

The monuments we raise, tempting fate,
We scrawl our names over them,
Condemning ourselves.

Here comes the army now
The angry, quill and brush wielding legions
Remembering us hateful, our own children
They paint our gardens and cities and roads
with their ever-growing palettes of words and colors,
But we recognize none of it.
Were not our sylvan-scapes pleasing?
Were not our Babylons and Romes pleasing?
Were they not the fruit of honest toil and imaginations as bright as any's?
Were not our hopes and intentions high and good?

I am old now, I am your mother and father
Baffled by your condemnation
Head on the chopping block, but
Was I not yesterday a promise, a hero?

Go and see!:
My name,
the now-ashen monument, still standing, if bowed and melancholy, in the center of town
bears it!

Alas, and at that, the ax falls:
"It is your fault, these miseries: these ill-conceived cities, these poorly managed gardens, these inefficient roads. One must pay for errors in judgement and deficiencies in information."

It's a bloodbath to make Robespierre blush --
The baby-faced victors, they arrogantly brandish their advantages, youth and no damned Congressional Record.
To be something other than the tormented practitioner, living in the gray,
Was not our lot.
God forgive us for our ignorance, we suppose, but
We stand proudly by our lives --
Even as we damaged, we repaired
And even as we destroyed, we created,
Which is the story of our race, the young ones will soon see.
- - -
Ah! How can I?
Defame the wombs and truncate the loins
Of teachers, explorers, innovators, and artists?
How can I bear their shamed confusion as they are led to slaughter,
the Old Guards, which were, one must remember, at one moment, the New Guards?

"Did I not yearn and strive," they ask me,
"Much as you. Did I not ponder stars and with a butterfly net, chase them, much as you?
Did I not encounter puzzles in new places, puzzles without a key, that I struggled to answer, but likely failed to understand, much as you?"

As they set to us these questions,
Which we answer with silent, stony piety and a finger toward the history books, the verdict,
Our own children look on.

They are sharpening their pencils and wetting their brushes,
Already conspiring against us and our endeavors.
They know, as we knew, that the battle has already been taken.
They will prevail.
With their vigor and technologies from on high and lessons learnt at a tender age from our own missteps,
They will prevail.