“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
― James Baldwin,
The NYPD vomited out of armored trucks
black as the horses of Lorca’s Guardia Civil:
brutality of batons, tear gas breathing dragons.
They beat punched kicked the world’s new rootless
who renounce boundaries, the wide-eyed youth
who claim no nation but humanity. Today
it is Palestine Tomorrow they will come for
all the rest of the malcontents, then the simply
different, the impious, the malingering poor.
§
I was not there. I’m writing in a chair
in a coffee shop across from
The Strand bookstore.
That was yesterday’s news and
tomorrow my daughter will be hooded
for her doctorate. She works
in a state mental hospital filled
with America’s damaged children.
Bailing daddy out of jail is not
on the commencement program.
What then is witness
from such a distance?
What were Palestine
or Vietnam to Baldwin
when he wrote those words?
Sometimes knowing the horror
is enough, if you publish it
far and wide and speak out
against the threatening tide.
Shall I wait patiently until
the immigrants are gone, for
the Red Terror of Christian
Nationalist churches
violent riots of patriots
all dutifully watched over by
mirrored riot masks of State
clutching truncheons of rage?
Write the light that needs to be,
the flare of gasoline rags in
the heroic bottles of history.
Well Bottom Blues 
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