Valentine’s Day Poem
It must be raining in Alagoas.I can hear the roar of water falling Falling As convoys of trucks, headlights gleaming Like fireflies, slither and crawl into a night Of vanished toucans, carrying away Carrying away your cheaply sold Long long hair.
O! These wounds they leave. O! These scalped and mute Gullied hilltops. Here teeth fall out by twenty or so And young women with lined faces Line the slave queues for any work. Lord, we pray for our daily bread. Lord, we pray for our death daily.
They make a desolation and call It progress. They make a desolation and call It development.
But what do children know of these games That suited ghosts in barricaded glass forts play? What do they know of cloudy statistics? Moody Ratings? Fickle capital flows?
Here future is the next uncertain meal. Here days hopscotch between the gaps Of death’s teeth. Here the face of god is Sugarcane falling from a stalled truck.
And here I am walking, with my arms Spread wide, Not like a prophet who promises Salvation or heaven – there is neither, But as a man who still suffers some, Into the as yet undivided, as yet unsold country of rain, To embrace you, my raped Alagoas.
All the above photographs © Tatiana Cardeal. Please click on the link to see more haunting photographs, and read commentry by Tatiana on the making of these photographs.
Notes: Jean Paul Sartre said literature should change the world and that writing is the most serious thing in the world. However I don’t know if it can, because to change the world takes two hands, like those of Zorba’s. So here, as I struggle to climb and claw my way into one of those high glass forts, when other realities sometimes slam into my scrubbed windscreen like bats, like night critters, I scream.
Why do I scream? Is it in some kind of horror, which is in some perverse way pleasurable – as people scream here, in dark theatres while they watch movies titled ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ etc, or in one of the gladiatorial arenas during traffic stopping events called ‘Super Bowl’ or ‘Monster Truck Madness’? In relief that it is they, those others, and not me? Is it to express some useless solidarity with the hungry, huddled and suffering masses at whom Lady Liberty now, mostly, winks? Would it be better if I simply remained silent?
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Some words in the afternoon...
Photograph by Gisela
[A] One blind man looks for the Truth among the labyrinth of books. What did other blind men look at in those years we can now label B.G. (Before Gutenberg)? Stars, Or autumn leaves perhaps, for some sign of arrival? [B] One winter the master gleefully hacked the Buddha standing at the gate into firewood. What will remain of this afternoon? Drawing water. Cutting firewood.
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On Trains
Photograph by João
[1] “The sounds of trains off in the distance, more or less made me feel at home, like nothing was missing, like I was at some level place, never in any significant danger and that everything was fitting together.”
From Bob Dylan’s brilliant and idiosyncratic memoir, “Chronicles, Volume One”
[2] Standing on the bridge, you see a freight train trundling from under you. A sequence of dark shapes, a chain of ants, oil tankers in a convoy, thirty or forty in number. The big engine up ahead is painted a dull red, the color of rust. The railway logos appear to be washing off from its sides in the steady drizzle. It has been raining all day and you wish to see the sun. Rain rhymes with pain, with train, and makes you ache for something you can’t clearly define.
You hammer your nerves to tell you of those places they are forgetting or have already forgotten. Town and villages in a distant country seen through a train window, to the bars of music played by iron wheels on iron rail – black snake, smelling of grease, shit and wide open spaces.
[3] It occurs to me that trains, both as a reality and as a metaphor, constantly recur in the work of many creative folk. Off the top of my head, from last weekend Eudora Wetly’s descriptions of her childhood train journeys and the strange unexplainable imputes they provided to her writing, in her book “A Writer’s Beginnings”, Nazim Hikmet’s brilliant, free wheeling meditation of a poem on life written on a train between Prague and Moscow, Victor Brombet’s evocative memoir called “Trains of Thought”, where everything in his life is tied to some or the train journey, Manto’s genius short stories that take me back to one of the central metaphors of India-Pakistan partition – exchange of trainloads of dripping corpses, trains in Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago”, cattle trains in “Schindler’s List”, hobo trains in Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road”, the title of a book I gave to a child-woman, as consolation, as a piece of my heart, before I left a country to arrive in this city, which as coincidences go was once called Terminus –Elizabeth Smart's “By The Grand Central Station, I Sat Down And Wept”, I close my eyes and I see those nearly two day long train journeys taken from a disappearing home to college with that friend who doesn’t write back anymore, of drinking tea sprawled over a walkway above train tracks at Hijili, hooting thundering freight trains hauling coal and iron ore providing the pauses in interminable and circular conversations on everything and nothing, W.H. Auden’s British trains, Pablo Neruda’s Chilean trains steered by his engine driver father, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s trains through the territory of Colombian magic realism and Esta Unidos Banana companies, that train which was set on fire, ahead of the train I was traveling in as a young boy on pilgrimage, by educated young men in the name of holy revolution –perfect idea for a novel I should write, bloody writers who want to transform agony into art, Zorba spits on such agony, the train which was completely washed away by the bloody bitch of a sea in Sri Lanka at the turn of this year, Sebastio Salagado’s photograph of Bombay trains and people that made me suffer all of last week, and this train pictured above, steaming on ice covered tracks, taking me on a journey into eternity, where everything fits together, again and again.
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