( via/ me )

ICE is asking people to stop...

"We had no way to talk about any of this. We were at the same time terribly intimate and terribly aloof. We could work shoulder to shoulder for days on end, on what we knew for sure were battle lines; we knew the smell and taste of each other's breath and sweat, but we never stopped, we never paused long enough to look each other in the eye.    And we had no vocabulary for these things. No concepts, really, for what was happening. Another world was breaking through to ours, and we were awash in it. We had in fact invited it and here it was, and mostly we saw it as good. We set blind boundaries, changed them, made impromptu rules, forgot them, quarreled, worked together. While some of us drifted out of reach on hard drugs, or the pure chemistry of denial and need.
   But we had no words, not even the thought to look for words to speak what was happening. OR
before we identified the weather pattern, the storm had already broken.
   You could put it like that." --Diane DiPrima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001)

Meanwhile in France.

"Mortality

This is the surest death
Of all the deaths I know.
The one that halts the breath,
The one that falls with snow
And nothing but a peace
Before the second zone,
For Aprils never cease
To resurrect their own,
And in my very veins
Flows blood as old as Eve.
The smallest cell contains
Its privileged reprieve,
But vultures recognize
This single mortal thing
And watch with hungry eyes
When hope starts staggering."

--Naomi Long Madgett, in The Poetry of Black America ed Arnold Adoff (1973)

Lament for the Chapbook Makers.