Praisesong in X and O

- By Jim Hicks

It’s not often (enough) that one of our own—or any poet at all—is given a nationally televised voice, even on that thin slice of broadcasting bandwidth still called “public.” And yet, the weekend prior to Obama’s second inauguration, MR contributing editor Martín Espada was invited onto Moyers & Company. For the next half hour, the impossible was banished from the airwaves.

Martín’s central message was clear: that poets are legislators, acknowledged or no. He made his case with a proverb from William Blake: "What is now proved was once only imagined." Moyers reminded him that contemporaries thought Blake mad, yet Espada would later return and respond: “oftentimes those of us who speak in the language of the impossible or the unthinkable, the unimaginable, are called idealists or dreamers or mad [....] But we're also pragmatists. We also understand the real world.”

As in any conversation, the real pleasure of listening to Moyers and Espada lies in the twists and turns along the trail, whether it’s in a shout-out to Sotomayor, or in the memory of, and the praisesong for, Howard Zinn.

The interview begins and ends with Martín reading his “Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass,” written just days after the 2008 election. That Espada happened to be in Rochester, and that he asked to be brought to see Douglass—an intimate visit to the crossroads of our national history—catalyze an alchemy of voice and page that simply must be heard, and then heard again. Just listen to Espada’s prophetic, sonorous baritone as he intones the word “now,” and “now” again.

If that doesn’t shiver your timbers, I don’t know what will.

Martín Espada

Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass
           Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester, New York
           November 7, 2008

This is the longitude and latitude of the impossible;
this is the epicenter of the unthinkable;
this is the crossroads of the unimaginable:
the tomb of Frederick Douglass, three days after the election.   

This is a world spinning away from the gravity of centuries,
where the grave of a fugitive slave has become an altar.
This is the tomb of a man born as chattel, who taught himself to read
          in secret,
scraping the letters in his name with chalk on wood; now on the anvil-flat
          stone
a campaign button fills the O in Douglass. The button says: Obama.
This is the tomb of a man in chains, who left his fingerprints
on the slavebreaker’s throat so the whip would never carve his back
          again;
now a labor union T-shirt drapes itself across the stone, offered up
by a nurse, a janitor, a bus driver. A sticker on the sleeve says: I Voted
          Today.
This is the tomb of a man who rolled his call to arms off the press,
peering through spectacles at the abolitionist headline; now a newspaper
spreads above his dates of birth and death. The headline says: Obama
         Wins.

This is the stillness at the heart of the storm that began in the body 
of the first slave, dragged aboard the first ship to America. Yellow leaves
descend in waves, and the newspaper flutters on the tomb, like the sails
Douglass saw in the bay, like the eyes of a slave closing to watch himself
escape with the tide. Believers in spirits would see the pages trembling
on the stone and say: look how the slave boy teaches himself to read. 
I say a prayer, the first in years: that here we bury what we call
the impossible, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, now and forever. Amen.

(from Martín Espada, The Trouble Ball. W.W. Norton, 2012)