Let us create a future we would want to speak in any language.
~ Alberto Rios
IMAGINE THE ANGELS OF BREAD
This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.
This is the year that those
who swim the border's undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.
If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.
— Eduardo Galeano
You who believe in this republic will be accused of daydreaming and utopianism. To these crimes you must plead guilty as charged. Tell them: Yes! I did it! I was daydreaming of a more just world instead of something more age-appropriate and consumer-oriented, like a $200 pair of Nikes.
This is Eduardo Galeano on the subject of utopia: “She’s on the horizon… I go two steps closer, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? Here’s what: it’s good for walking.”
A century ago, when your father’s grandfather was a child, the eight-hour workday was utopian; the eradication of polio was utopian; the end of lynching and segregation in the South was utopian. The next generation writes the poetry of the impossible.
You will make the impossible possible. Yet, no change for the good ever happens without being imagined first. This last poem is about the bread of the table, the bread of poetry, the bread of justice, the bread of this republic.
