by Cesar R. Chacon
The breath of One,
his last on a splintered cross,
is being carried across our time,
through the branches and the leaves
that loom over me like over-bearing brothers.
I've always wondered how,
through the intimate woods that keep
round time within their trunks,
we still choose fisted revolution
over common sense.
Will the angry flowers never die?
I sit alone sometimes
in the second floor of the university
library, flipping through history old
and news of this twisted continent,
and my uprooted Latin lands.
Here and there, dark faces stare
at me, the black students leaving
after study, and I want to hold on
by their deltoids and ask
if Africa is far to them,
if Africa is fear to them.
They will shrug me off,
shut the elevator door.
A tattered red flag, like a cloud,
covers the Latin American sky
(it should've been the constellation-ed
tilma of a bellied woman, but that time,
it seems, has passed; it would take
discalced Jesuits–a legion of Christ–
to bring us back our hope)
where bored and anxious youth
receive the virus from aged professors
who remember the bright lights of the
North American sixties, receive word
of empty causes, shallow goals
(and a really, really dorky way of dancing white
in the psychedelic mud).
All you need is love is true.
But we always kill the lovers, don't we?
We choose again a revolutionary
over Love incarnate
with the words of “crucify him.”
Che, it goes for lots, might just be bigger than Jesus.
