You fell in the homeland on the way to the lieu.
In darkness you broke your hip.
I managed to pick you up. Humans don’t fall
as empires, or leaves blown away with others.
They do not move to Constantinople
as Christian Romans did after the fall of Rome.
Humans call to husbands, friends, go to surgeries.
We speak of the war wounded as the fallen.
There was the Fall, original sin.
What is the least original sin,
one that just belongs to me, precious,
more mine than my telephone number,
more mine than my teeth?
I have a sin in darkness,
a grandmotherless grandchild,
a broken hip.
Mothers of mothers, fathers of fathers,
sisters, brothers tell me the final sin,
the least original
after God knows how many generations.
God help God if He knows now.
After Biblical, Koranic, saintly names
are changed, then abandoned as unlucky,
we might just be known as numbers, preoccupations.
Who will come from where?
What will be the dog-eared languages?
I hope to know the late future English
new words for father, mother, son, and daughter,
“family” may be out of style, in distant social circles.
If we commit the sin of “bombs away,”
in the toasty Antarctic,
we may only speak fallout baby-talk, chatter or croak,
or simply be voiceless, our homelands sand,
or coral reefs.
Still we may walk with Gandhi, or Doctor King,
out of the valley of despair
to the table of brother and sisterhood,
where nations become warless, hip states,
where hip God or Gods lend a hand,
Here’s the rap on hip,
a lonely trip:
darling, dance the Broken Bone.
Dance the Saint Joan.
Have a hip vision,
it’s better than television.
Africa was born, broke its hip,
moved across the Atlantic, a long, slow trip,
left the Amazon behind
with crocodiles and their kind.
There was this upheaval
before there was good and evil.
Before the birds could sing, there was rap,
reason to clap.
There were volcanoes
when the unnamed Congo
moved from mango and tangos
to harps and banjos,
ears came after eyes,
sweatshirts before neckties.
Don’t you think
there was the hip dance of the eyeball
in the eye’s dancehall before the wink?
Hip we fall into pretending to see the future,
sin and virtue post offices:
in the new world, order and disorder,
new languages, bodies and sexes changed,
the common white potato become
a rainbow potato, boiled, roasted, or fried.
It’s a sin to fry a rainbow.
What will a future universe hold
in Fatima’s open hand? Who’s there,
a fugitive with many offenses,
the foul-mouthed North Wind?
Since we know in the beginning was “the word,”
it would be useful to know in the end the last word,
after moonlight has long since disappeared,
sunlight become warm darkness,
cooled down to a little little snow—
perhaps a single, graceful ant ice-skates,
blind, it sees nothing.
When everything is over, much loved green green
become the colorless disliked.
In the beautiful ugly many-faced Picasso present,
my country has a cyber-age broken hip,
slavery, the original sin of our nation.
Danger: stars, like tears, falling off flags—
thirty percent still wish the South won the Civil War.
We must reculturalize,
not simply educate, call it “change of heart,”
from mother’s breast or formula to furnace or grave,
feed the young democracy finger food,
with Roman charity nurse elders.
A national surprise, those who love
and those who hate their work, will strike,
organize for full freedom and equality.
Ojalá. Inshallah.
Rockabye baby still throwing rocks.
What is the opposite of a miracle? Didn’t satellites
come from lava, mud, peat, pitch, sand?
Courage is being hip with a broken hip,
with malice toward none,
despite the crack in Lincoln’s moral marble legs.