Now You Smile at Everything, Even the Priests, the Militia

The only three Beatles songs I ever seek out and play are George's two great Yellow Submarine songs and this Lennon song from Yellow Submarine

I now hurry to turn off Beatles songs I hear, I can play any song in my head whenever I want and I never want, that's how much I once listened, how influential they still are to me, but I still play Lennon (and George, of course) solo albums, and John was born eighty years ago today

• Whole lotta bristling going on
  
• I am not saying our shitlords will forbid Trump destroying the facade of American democracy, I am saying they're making plain they'd rather he didn't (and have hedged their bets either way)
  
• Police state
  
• But this FBI busts cracker militia story, remember in the run-up to Bush 2's Iraq war the highly publicized FBI busts of Middle Eastern amateur wannabe bombers?
  
• Six of the arrested live within ten miles of my daughter's house
  
• Why Liberals feign powerlessness
• Why aren't Obama, both Clintons, and the current presidential candidate of the motherfucking Democratic Party in Harris County Texas denouncing Texas governor's blatant voter suppression tactics? Today in Rhetorical Questions!  
• The other Democratic party, or, nostalgia for boss politics and Trump
  
• He doesn't break hearts, or: fascism versus authoritarianism
• Why US elections don't change US foreign policy
  
• Children of the Appalachians
• I work in a Brutalist building 
  
• On Josipovici's 80th birthday
• The experience of experience itself

 

 

INGATHERING

Carolyn Kizer

The poets are going home now,

After the years of exile,

After the northern climates

Where they worked, lectured, remembered,

Where they shivered at night

In an indifferent world.

Where God was the god of business,

And men would violate the poets’ moon,

And even the heavens become zones of war.

 

The poets are going home

To the blood-haunted villages,

To the crumbling walls, still pocked

With a spray of bullets;

To the ravine, marked with a new cross,

Where their brother died.

No one knows the precise spot where they shot him,

But there is a place now to gather, to lay wreaths.

The poets will bring flowers.

 

The poets are coming home

To the cafés, to the life of the streets at twilight,

To slip among the crowds and greet their friends;

Thee young poets, old now, limping, who lean on a cane:

Or the arm of a grandchild, peer with opaque eyes

At the frightening city, the steel and concrete towers

Sprung up in their absence.

Yet from open doorways comes the odor of grapes

Fermented, of fish, of oil, of pimiento…

 

The poets have come home

To the melodious language

That settles in their heads like moths alighting,

This language for which they starved

In a world of gutturals,

Crude monosyllables barked by strangers.

Now their own language enfolds them

With its warm vocables.

The poets are home.

 

Yes, they have come back

To look up at the yellow moon,

Cousin of that cold orb that only reflected

Their isolation.

They have returned to the olives, the light,

The sage-scented meadows,

The whitewashed steps, the tubs of geraniums,

The sere plains, the riverbanks spread with laundry,

The poppies, the vineyards, the bones of mountains.

 

Yes, poets, welcome home

To your small country

Riven by its little war

(As the world measures these events),

A country that remembers heroes and tears;

Where, in your absence, souls kept themselves alive

By whispering your words.

Now you smile at everything, even the priests, the militia,

The patient earth that is waiting to receive you.