Poetry: Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World

Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World

                    For the community of Newtown, Connecticut,
                    where twenty students and six educators lost their
                    lives to a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary
                    School, December 14, 2012

Now the bells speak with their tongues of bronze.
Now the bells open their mouths of bronze to say:
Listen to the bells a world away. Listen to the bell in the ruins
of a city where children gathered copper shells like beach glass,
and the copper boiled in the foundry, and the bell born
in the foundry says: I was born of bullets, but now I sing
of a world where bullets melt into bells. Listen to the bell
in a city where cannons from the armies of the Great War
sank into molten metal bubbling like a vat of chocolate,
and the many mouths that once spoke the tongue of smoke
form the one mouth of a bell that says: I was born of cannons,
but now I sing of a world where cannons melt into bells.

Listen to the bells in a town with a flagpole on Main Street,
a rooster weathervane keeping watch atop the Meeting House,
the congregation gathering to sing in times of great silence.
Here the bells rock their heads of bronze as if to say:
Melt the bullets into bells, melt the bullets into bells.
Here the bells raise their heavy heads as if to say:
Melt the cannons into bells, melt the cannons into bells.
Here the bells sing of a world where weapons crumble deep
in the earth, and no one remembers where they were buried.
Now the bells pass the word at midnight in the ancient language
of bronze, from bell to bell, like ships smuggling news of liberation
from island to island, the song rippling through the clouds.

Now the bells chime like the muscle beating in every chest,
heal the cracks in the bell of every face listening to the bells.
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the moon.
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the world.

by Martín Espada

From Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon Press, 2017). 
Courtesy poets.org

Another One From Martín

Because one is never enough when it comes to Martín....


The Day We Buried You in the Park


If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
--Walt Whitman

The day we buried you in the park
I couldn’t say no. Your wife had a plan,
revealed on the phone with the hush of conspiracy;
there are laws in this city against the interment
of human remains in public spaces.

This was the Poets’ Park, your vision
floating like the black butterflies of cinders
over the house in ruins across the street.
You and Juan saw the stone steps flowing down
into the circle where the poets would stand and sing one day.
You and Juan saw the poets showering the air with words
and the trees drinking words like water.
You nailed up the sign and spread your arms to greet us
at the ceremony. This could not be explained
to the clerk who stamps the licenses
for the burial of the dead.

Juan began to cry when he saw your ashes
in the wheelbarrow. I shook him by the shoulder;
the neighbor who watches the park from her window
was eyeing us. I handed him the shovel.
We had to clamp our jaws like mobsters
stoically soiling their hands with the grit of a rival thug.
Your wife poured a bag of plant food over your ashes
in case the neighbor peeked too long through the hedges
or the cops rolled their cruiser to a stop, bored
after years of shoving drunks into the back seat.
We stirred the ashes with our hands till they turned white at the wrist,
and what I’d heard was true: there is bone that will not burn,
bodies that refuse to become dust, the stubborn shards of a man.
Ask any criminal who labors to bury the evidence.

We weren’t criminals. We dug the hole in the wrong place,
ripped out the roots, grunted with every shovel full of rocks.
We made the little grave too big, then tossed away the dirt,
forgetting that we’d need to fill the hole once we dumped you in it.
When I tipped the wheelbarrow, your ashes landed with a puff,
drifting in the briefest of clouds over the grass, and Juan
dropped to his knees, crying again, giving us away.
The neighbor poked her head from the window
like a chicken suspicious of the world beyond the coop.

An hour after we began, I wore a mask of ash and sweat, black shoes white,
like the last man in the village to hear the warning of volcano,
or a miner on the first day back at work after the strike is lost,
or a believer smeared with his ancestors about to wash in the great river.
A woman who recognized my face stopped me as I crossed the street.
Did you just bury something in the park? she asked.
Why would I do a thing like that, I said.

The day we buried you in the park, I drove home
with three scoops of your ashes in a coffee can:
Chock Full o’Nuts, the Heavenly Coffee, their slogan
emblazoned in a cloud across the New York skyline.
At your desk there was bad coffee and good poetry,
but no heaven, so I will look for you under my bootsoles,
walking through the world, soaking up the ghosts wherever I may go.

by Martín Espada