“Sing to Yah,” cries the prophet Miryam,
as the Waters of Life rise around us
“Look!” cries the prophet Micah,
“Our God is coming out of hiding...
The mountains melt beneath and the valleys split apart,
like wax before the fire, water rushing down a slope.”
and as the shofar sounds on Rosh Hashana,
we hear the words of the prophet Chana:
“The bows of the mighty are broken,
And the feeble are girded with strength.
Men once sated must hire out for bread;
Those once hungry hunger no more...
The Eternal deals death and gives life,
Casts down to the grave and raises up...
Raises the poor from the dust,
Lifts up the needy from the ashes...”
This is the Year
after Martín Espada, and all prophets
This is in fact the year that squatters evict landlords,
meeting like city planners in the open of the parking lot
or sipping coffee with a blessing
for watching morning rain through the window
This is the year
that brown-skinned refugees
ship politicians to far off cities
who stare at their feet on buses and planes
considering the hospitality they will receive
This is the year that police glocks
scald the hands that grab them
and tasers backfire on their wielders
This is the year
that Indigenous children
buried under boarding schools
return to play on swing sets
and ask the teachers
difficult questions
This is the year
economics classes are banned
and aspiring investment bankers
have no place to study
This is the year that the small-minded bullies
who police our bodies and legislate our relatives to death
cannot find a public bathroom they feel comfortable peeing in
This is the year the fully-grown spoiled brats
and shameless fascists who rule our world and would cover it
in prisons to be filled with our children
wake in those cold rooms of their own making
and the eyes of those who have languished
sick, hungry and maddening in those cells
awaken each morning to the light of sun on their faces
and the scent of the angels of bread
This is the year that rats
grow fat in petting zoos, that no mother
wakes to the sound of rodents
chewing through her tent
This is the year cop cities,
police stations and torture sites
are razed to the ground to make space
for native forests and community orchards
This is the year we flood the courts and halls of power with justice
like a mighty river, like a hurricane, like wild fire
Until the high places of the world have been laid low
This is the year that billionaires
apply for Unemployment Assistance
and no dollars are given for bulldozers
to demolish the homes of Palestinian families
in Eretz Yisrael
If the abolition of slave auction blocks
began as a vision of human beings unshackled,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of witch trials
began as imagination of human beings
unafraid of burning stakes, of drowning stones, or the gallows,
then this is the year;
if every revolution begins with the idea
that arrogant barons in fine clothes
are not divinely anointed lords,
that they too drown
if swallowed by the sea,
then this is the year.
So may every plundered body,
veins like desecrated rivers,
rise with the Waters of Life.
