Against Atrocity
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About this ebook
Margaret Randall
Writer and social activist Margaret Randall is the author of more than eighty published books, including To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (2009) and, most recently, As If the Empty Chair / Como si la silla vaca (a bilingual book of poetry) and First Laugh (essays). She lives in Albuquerque.
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Against Atrocity - Margaret Randall
Author
COUNTING BACKWARD TO THE LAND
The high desert is a dog with no sense of time.*
* From Nuevo Mexico
by Renny Golden in Blood Desert, Witnesses 1820-1880 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010).
COUNTING BACKWARD
Counting backward, common practice
at my age, I may stumble upon
the ancient turquoise bead I stooped to gather
from Chaco’s purple sand.
I knew I was acting against legality
and moral rightness
when I refused to return that bead
to its millennial seasons.
Continuing to count, I might remember
a conversation pierced by shadow,
that woman who passed us on the trail,
helped when I fell against a rock,
then disappeared when we tried
to thank her: ghosts when least expected,
melodies singing in my head for years,
giving me comfort when alone.
I return to the high temperature
of steadying hands on mine
when the sound of soldier’s boots
thunders through my head.
Any soldiers. Any boots. Any war.
I clutch to my breast
the birth of each child,
holding fast its place in body memory.
Counting, I always find your kiss
of prolonged intensity,
lips that thirty years on haven’t ceased
to caress mine with their gentle fire.
No need to go backward
to embrace that kiss.
It is with me as I write,
bathes me in permanence.
ESTIMATED COST
A pleated ridge of clouds blankets my mountains this morning:
between embrace and ominous, revealing deception
normal in these times.
A hopeful young scientist proposes installing a giant fan
where it can blow frigid air off the North Pole
causing the ice cap to thicken again,
preventing a rise of oceans swallowing small nations
and the need of those whose fans are woven
of crude palm and ordinary dream.
Five hundred billion is the estimated cost for something
that may or may not work, and we all know
what estimated means.
We could decide to lower earth’s temperature
by reducing our consumption of fossil fuel
but that would cut into profits
and how then would we pay for the fan? The trouble
with poets, they say, is we fail to understand
how complex everything is,
busy as we are contemplating a surprise cloud bank
and putting two and two together
in clear morning light.
CRISSCROSSING THIS GENEROUS NEST
The American bison yesterday, like caribou
or wildebeest today, Canada geese,
Monarch butterflies, and salmon
fighting their way upstream:
all follow seasonal instinct, their need
to leave and return etched in the cycle
each journey describes.
Whales swim vast miles to feed, mate
and give birth, their yearly travels
taking them along unraveling coasts
welcoming new generations
as they circumnavigate naval sonar
and other impediments
with determination that astounds.
Magnetic perception, lunar orientation,
landmarks, echolocation, scent
or solar heat:
patterns of movement handed down
from generation to generation
attract and repel whole communities
crisscrossing this generous nest.
We humans too follow patterns laid down
by need. Outcast Europeans
defying oceans to begin again in a new place,
southern Blacks moving north in search
of work and dignity.
Exploration or displacement
depending upon who tells the story.
But male need too often follows a scent
of blood: disappearance, exile, war.
The Middle Passage remembers
foul vessels stuffed with human cargo.
Today’s migrations leave a trail
of deflated life vests, abandoned toys,
stories severed before The End.
Man, and it’s almost always man,