Portside

How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way

By Martín Espada

Not songs of loyalty alone are these,
But songs of insurrection also,
For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over.
      Walt Whitman

I see the dark-skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell

before the whip and steel, the last blood pooling, the last breath spitting.

I see the immigrant street vendor flashing his wallet to the cops,

shot so many times there are bullet holes in the soles of his feet.

I see the deaf woodcarver and his pocketknife, crossing the street

in front of a cop who yells, then fires. I see the drug raid, the wrong

door kicked in, the minister’s heart seizing up. I see the man hawking

a fistful of  cigarettes, the cop’s chokehold that makes his wheezing

lungs stop wheezing forever.  I am in the crowd, at the window,

kneeling beside the body left on the asphalt for hours, covered in a sheet.

I see the suicides: the conga player handcuffed for drumming on the subway,

hanged in the jail cell with his hands cuffed behind him; the suspect leaking

blood from his chest in the back seat of the squad car; the 300-pound boy

said to stampede barehanded into the bullets  drilling his forehead.

I see the coroner nodding, the words he types in his report burrowing

into the skin like more bullets. I see the government investigations stacking,

words buzzing on the page, then suffocated as bees suffocate in a jar.  I see

the next Black man, fleeing as the fugitive slave once fled the slave-catcher,

shot in the back for a broken tail light. I see the cop handcuff the corpse.

I see the rebels marching, hands upraised before the riot squads,

faces in bandannas against the tear gas, and I walk beside them unseen.

I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn

will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder

how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of  slaves

still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke

every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore.

Called by Sandra Cisneros “the Pablo Neruda of North American poets, “ Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn in 1957. He has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new collection of poems is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.