This is the Year (5786)

 
This is the Year

after Martín Espada

This is the year the poets drop our metaphors

Until the cops and armies drop their guns

Or even break their ranks and turn their fire

On their own generals, the very ones

Who order all this carnage and this chaos
To stop the order of the World to Come

Who fear us and the future we’re revealing 

Where violence isn’t where our strength comes from

This is the years those forced to flee their homelands
Are welcomed everywhere with bread and song
In thousands of new anthems to our freedom
Sung out in all our sacred mother tongues

This is the year the ghosts of the six million

Return to sabotage Israeli drones 

To circle all our Palestinian cousins

and walk with them, and sing their spirits home

This is the year the grandmothers still clutching
Their own keys to to their own great grandmothers’ homes
Return to mount those keys above the hearthstones
And brew pots of spiced coffee on the stove

This is the year the laws are all rewritten

In languages the colonizers banned

To reinstate the sacrosanct relation

That we belong, as people, to the land

This is the year the churches built on mass graves

With lumber from the clear cut ancient woods

Unfold themselves to let the voice of God in

And turn back into forests now for good

This is the year the faces on Mount Rushmore

Are overgrown with sweetgrass and with sage
That burst forth through those pirates’ ears and noses
Restoring those Hills to their wild age

This is the year the Eagle is remembered

For who he is: not violent arrogance

But warrior and teacher flying fearless

Over every prison, border wall, and fence

This is the year the voices of the prophets

In every city where their people starve

and preach the good news: “We are all related”

are multiplied by millions as we march

This is the year the billionaires go bankrupt

As we the people nationalize the banks
And sentence them to life working on arctic

Restoration, with their cronies in their ranks

This is the year the workers in the factories
Producing bombs, tanks, missiles, jets and drones

Take over the assembly lines, and use them 

To rebuild war-torn cities, roads, and homes

This is the year the madness of the world

Erupting in our streets and on our screens

is rallied by a rhythm that emerges

creating poetry out of the screams:

We are like water running to the ocean

We are the children of our own free dawn

We are its anthem, pulsing like a hand drum

We are full human beings, not just pawns

We are the life of everything unshackling

We are the ancient prophecies fulfilled

We’ve come this far to now redeem our birthright:

The healing of our home, the people’s will

Our Power isn’t over one another

Our Law is not a weapon or a curse

Our Truth is not the property of rulers

Our scriptures say the last will be the first

And so, may every mouth now parched and starving

Fill with the angels of clean water, bread,

And peace, and may their wings become our shelter 

And over all the earth may wholeness spread