Pace e Bene

August 1981: For Daniel Berrigan

 

You are outside tonight,

adrift in the whirred glare tiny fragments spin,

missing in action in the

hard artificial light,

that cliche of space

and time.

Wandering, you find

the Salvadoran dead

lying on Broadway,

frozen and numbered.

Traffic picks its way round bodies

that appear by magic.

The public is outraged by the inconvenience.

But you remain.

What memory does this

loosen?

What hand pressed

against the spiraled flesh of your own?

What recognition

scenes unfold?

What poignant dreams?

 

While the chatter of death

plays on,

upstairs the music

rattles like stones

swung inside

a bowl big like the earth,

swung by one

whose life

swings out in circles.

 Upstairs there is the low bellow,

and the colored stones—

sienna, camel, burnt-orange,

each like eyes—

are wrested from rest

by the fiery feathered dance,

by the chord

struck at the start

of all new things,

which even now

is clear and clean,

 which even now

urges the thin crust of the ground

forward and back.

 

You are here, Daniel,

learning to balance by shaking,

practicing the vertigo of spirit

that fixes you

to this precious earth.

 

 Photo: Judith Kelly