This is a poetic commentary on A Racial Justice Vidui/Confessional.
You can find the full foot-noted version here.
Indeed, we and our ancestors have sinned…
There is an altar.
Many know of it.
Some talk of it.
But few visit it.
It is in a place called America,
It is not found in any city
But in every city
And blade of heartland wheat
And in words exchanged
In thoroughfares,
Arteries,
And general stores.
And yea, it is a white altar,
An alabaster lesion dripping with pork-barrel suet,
Piggul,
Carrion and carcass
Piled sky high.
Holiness is not there
She left long ago
By stages.
She is found, rather,
In the crack of Liberty Bell
In the immigrant’s resolve
In the turning of a neighbor
Like a young prince
Or a shepherd
To see a bush burning but not yet consumed
To see a man beaten to feed the American dream,
Stepping into the breach.
We, who know the language of trauma,
The shrewd arithmetic of whips and cucumbers,
Of “free fish” and ink
Of melons and syringes
Of guns, pits, and onions.
Of fleshpots and the flesh
In Egypt, Spain, Germany, and the Pale of Settlement,
Can hear the blood crying out in Tulsa, Montgomery, Boston, and Baltimore,
When we cut the caul from our ears,
From our hearts,
From our memories.
When we saw Egypt dead upon the shore,
Pharaoh was not to be found,
But the smallest corpuscle of the tyrant’s taint
Found its way into our hearts
And here in the goldene medine,
A golden calf comes out of the strange fire
Of prosperity,
Of the burying of refugee consciousness,
Of the rabble-rousers and the riff-raff,
Of the union and the greenhorn.
The American offering is
slaughtered buffalo
shortness of breath
petro-chemicals
and sugar
tobacco and cotton
and brokerages of bodies
mass incarceration
and dehumanization.
And yet, it could be
rams instead of rape
return
remorse
restitution
to relatives
and maybe remission?
Siblings standing surety for another
necks loose
and hearts soft and pliant
like reeds.
On that day
the intransigence of Pharaoh
that crudest spore
will be expunged
and flung to the stars
to land at the foot of the Divine Throne
and They will smile
a joy as infinite and Unconditional
as “Here I am”
“I am my sibling’s keeper”
and
“Love your neighbor as Yourself”.
