Watching City Hall #471

FIDEL CASTRO

The president of the other America has fallen ill
and it is his birthday. We wish him Happy
Birthday and a speedy recovery.

By the other America, we don’t simply mean
his brothers and sister in Venezuela, Bolivia,
Chile, Peru, Brazil, Haiti and the like.

We mean also the 37 million people living destitute
and in misery in these disunited States, of whom
six million kids go to bed hungry every night,

while a murder machine waves the false flag of security
and makes war on the poor of the world.
What is more insecure than the empty belly of a child?

The president of the other America knows that there is
a poverty that is the wealth of the world. Viva the poverty
of Cuba that makes even the comrade on the cross applaud.

Viva the dignity of Cuba, whose island arms stretch
all the way to the equality of love that is Africa.
There is a man who has understood that life is worth

nothing if it is not free, and freedom nothing if it is not
consciousness of necessity—principled, palpable and priceless.
That is Fidel. That is fidelidad. Be well, commandante. Feliz cumpleanos.

NEVER AGAIN

They were gassed, burned by the millions
simply because they existed.
Those who survived said: Never again!
They were asked to come to Hanoi
and continue the socialist revolution.
They responded: Never again!

We will never again trust any government.
We will make our home in Palestine,
defeat the Arabs there, scatter them or
let them live as ragged shadows
in the camps of our occupation.
We will live in and on the capital of America,

as Israel, by name, as the Jewish nation,
and never again be holocausted for
the crime of simply being.
But even as Israel grew and prospered,
those whom it displaced and arrested
were whispering: Never again!

Poor and landless, they built their resistance
and fought and lost again and again
to Zionism’s army of American weapons.
The language of socialism, of the friendship
and harmony of peoples of different cultures
died of attrition in the Middle East, from
money. Deals. Dunny meals. Doomy mules.
Dummy moles. Mummy doles. The Star
of David unfurled over the land,
but the real Davids were in the streets
throwing stones at the Goliath.
O philistine irony and reversal of the Hebrew.

They who are the poorest and stateless,
who’ve turned their hatred of submission
to slavery into martyr brigades of suicided
Human weapons, and called their brethren
to join their attack upon the ferocious colony
of the United States of Exploitation;

they, the poorest and homeless, in whom
the only solution still breathes, the only
solution that isn’t genocide or fratricide
or a final solution itself, where hand-clasp
and words can still mutually open the gates
to the language of the future socialism

of New Israel and New Palestine,
is where Never again!
will be the united cry
of both, aimed
at the land of the fraud
and the home of the greed.

CUBA WISER

In a poem I wrote earlier this year
I described capitalism as a pack
of “rabid attack dogs destroying
each other over hunks of money.”
We see the truth of that image everyday
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Lebanon:
Dead children’s limbs in the jaws of
those mongrels of greed, wails of women
drowned in the barkness that’s biting
their sorrow to shreds. Cuba-wise,
we know there’s only one process to peace:
the palpable voyage of human discourse
along paths of the hoped-for socialism.
From the belly of the beast of beasts,
in a time of a contagion of ravines
and a pestilence of superfluous things,
I invoke you, necessary island, principled main
for all revolutionary fighters,
helmsman through this cybernetic sea aflame,
with your visionary eyes. Cuba wiser.