I
For King, for Robert Kennedy,
destroyed by those they could not save,
for King for Kennedy I mourn.
And for America, self-destructive, self-betrayed.
I grieve. Yet know the vanity
of grief—through power of
The Blessed Exile’s
transilluminating word
aware of how these deaths, how all
the agonies of our deathbed childbed age
are process, major means whereby,
oh dreadfully, our humanness must be achieved.
II
Killing people to save, to free them?
With napalm lighting routes to the future?
III
He comes to my table in his hungry wounds
and his hunger. The flamed-out eyes,
their sockets dripping. The nightmare mouth.
He snatches food from my plate, raw
fingers bleeding, seizes my glass
and drinks, leaving flesh-fragments on its rim.
IV
Vietnam bloodclotted name in my consciousness
recurring and recurring
like the obsessive thought many midnights
now of my own dying
Vietnam and I think of the villages
mistakenly burning the schoolrooms devouring
their children and I think of those who
were my students
brutalized killing
wasted by horror
in ultimate loneliness
dying
Vietnam Vietnam
V
Oh, what a world we make,
oppressor and oppressed.
Our world—
this violent ghetto, slum
of the spirit raging against itself.
We hate kill destroy
in the name of human good
our killing and our hate destroy.
VI
Lord Riot
naked
in flaming clothes
cannibal ruler
of anger’s
carousals
sing hey nonny no
terror
his tribute
shriek of bloody glass
his praise
sing wrathful sing vengeful
sing hey nonny no
gigantic
and laughing
sniper on tower
I hate
I destroy
I am I am
sing he nonny no
sing burn baby burn
VII
voice in the wilderness
Know that love has chosen you
to live his crucial purposes.
Know that love has chosen you.
And will not pamper you nor spare;
demands obedience to all
the rigorous laws of risk,
does not pamper, will not spare.
Oh, master now love’s instruments—
complex and not for the fearful,
simple and not for the foolish.
Master now love’s instruments.
I who love you tell you this,
even as the pitiful killer waits for me,
I who love you tell you this.
VIII
Light and the
distortions
of light as
the flame-night
dawns
Zenith-time and the anger
unto death and the
fire-focused
image
of a man
invisible man
and black boy and native
son and the
man who
lives underground whose
name nobody
knows
harrowing havocking
running through
holocaust
seeking the
soul-country of his
meaning
IX
As the gook woman howls
for her boy in the smouldering,
as the expendable Clean-Cut Boys
From Decent American Homes
are slashing off enemy ears for keepsakes;
as the victories are tallied up
with flag-draped coffins, plastic bodybags,
what can I say
but this, this:
We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.
Reclaim now, now renew the vision of
a human world where godliness
is possible and man
is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike
but man
permitted to be man.
X
and all the atoms cry aloud
I bear Him witness now
Who by the light of suns beyond the suns beyond
the sun with shrill pen
revealed renewal of
the covenant of timelessness with time, proclaimed
advent of splendor joy
alone can comprehend
and the imperious evils of an age could not
withstand and stars
and stones and seas
acclaimed—His life its crystal image and
magnetic field.
I bear Him witness now—
mystery Whose major clues are the heart of man,
the mystery of God:
Bahá’u’lláh:
Logos, poet, cosmic hero, surgeon, architect
of our hope of peace,
Wronged, Exiled One,
chosen to endure what agonies of knowledge, what
auroral dark
bestowals of truth
vision power anguish for our future’s sake.
“I was but a man
“like others, asleep upon
My couch, when, lo, the breezes of the All-Glorious
were wafted over Me. . . .”
Called, as in dead of night
a dreamer is roused to help the helpless flee
a burning house.
I bear Him witness now:
toward Him our history in its disastrous quest
for meaning is impelled.