Despedida Quieta

Despedida Quieta
after Patrick Rosal

Dear heavy heart, dear poets, dear love-
starved ones, hear this: there are ancient
ruptures you must heal. Sigh your deepest
tearful wailings. Let your cries be pure
and harsh. Raw as noise, or soft
as wordless truth. Rip
the lies inside your soul to shreds
and sew yourself back up
with your own voice.

Nap when you want.
Sit as long as it serves.
Play your music as loud as you need to.

O, snowflakes,
O, lurkers,
O quiet quitters,
O fearless vanguard
of the Great Resignation,

Yours are the Kingdoms of Heaven and Hell,
the Earth and all of its fullness

Your revolution laughs
with the brash certainty 
of its own inevitability
on small screens between double shifts,
on trains from one gig to another

As each tired terrifying normal morning
brings its daily search for a cup of coffee
without the taste of genocide or slavery,
as the day drags on with more news of the dead
and all the accompanying reasons
as to why fascism is our best hope

and you gently sow seeds of liberation
in every conversation

Your business is salvation
Your future owes you a past
As much as history
has pledged redemption

and Now is Yours
and You are Here
and We will never know the intimacy
of your impossible piece of the chaos

but know:

Your tears are drops in the same great sea
that steadily reshapes continents
and even now is gathering in tidal waves

And when at last the struggle gives,
when walls and prisons fracture at your footsteps,
we will weep with gratitude to kiss your feet –

All of us, who promised what you gave,
your Ancestors and all your Angels dear.