Martín Espada—Two Poems for a Lights for Liberty Rally

Poet Martín Espada.

My friend Everett Hoagland, proud and skilled Black poet who has lived and worked much of his life in mostly white environments was kind enough to share the work of another writer of importance and discernment.  Hoagland has been the poet laureate of New Bedford, Massachusetts and is a long-time member of the First Unitarian Church there.  When Everett recommends a poet I sit up and take notice

Martín Espada is a 62 year old poet, academic, and activist who was born in Brooklyn, New York to Puerto Rican parents.  His father was a leader in the Puerto Rican community and the civil rights movement.  Espada received a B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a doctorate of law from Northeastern University in Boston.  For many years, he worked as a tenant lawyer and a supervisor of a legal services program. 

In 1982, Espada published his first book of political poems, The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero, featuring photography by his father.  Since then he has written thirteen more highly praised volumes in English and in Spanish, most recently Vivas to Those Who Have Failed which was published in 2016 by W.W. Norton.

His work has gleaned honors including the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1986; the PEN/Revson Foundation Fellowship in Poetry, 1989; Paterson Poetry Prize, 1991; National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, 1992; National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, 1997; Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, 1997; Pushcart Prize, 1999,  Independent Publisher Book Award, 1999; Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, 2001; American Library Association Notable Book, 2004; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2006; Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 2007; Library Journal Best Poetry Books, 2007; National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, 2008; Massachusetts Book Award, 2012; International Latino Book Award, 2012; Busboys and Poets Award, 2014; Academy of American Poets Fellowship, 2018; and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, 2018 among others.

He is currently a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry.

Espada spoke at a July 12 Lights for Liberty vigil to end detention camps at the Unitarian Universalist First Church in Salem, Massachusetts. The two poems he shared there and some explanatory notes are featured in the current issue of the venerable Progressive.

Espada's Lights for Liberty poems are in the current July/August issue of The Progressive.

Espada explained his first verse:

Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, with the pronouncement that Mexicans crossing the border brought with them a range of criminal tendencies from drug smuggling to rape. That August, two brothers, Scott and Steve Leader, took him at his word, attacking a homeless Mexican immigrant as he slept outside the JFK subway stop on the Red Line.

This poem is about that hate crime. It’s also about Donald Trump’s idea of hell: empathy. There were many more healing hands than hurting hands placed on the victim’s body that night. Now, since this is a poem about a hate crime, there is some language and imagery you might find ugly. The poem is called:

Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. —Donald Trump, June 16, 2015

They woke him up by pissing in his face. He opened his mouth 

to scream in Spanish, so his mouth became a urinal at the ballpark.

Scott and Steve: the Leader brothers, celebrating a night at Fenway, 

where the Sox beat the Indians and a rookie named Rodríguez spun 

the seams on his changeup to hypnotize the Tribe. Later that night, 

Steve urinated on the door of his cell, and Scott told the cops why 

they did it:  Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported.

He was a Mexican in a sleeping bag outside JFK station on a night 

in August, so they called him a wetback and emptied their bladders

in his hair. In court, the lawyers spoke his name: Guillermo Rodríguez

immigrant with papers, crop-picker in the fields, trader of bottles 

and cans collected in his cart. Two strangers squashed the cartilage

in his nose like a can drained of beer. In dreams, he would remember

the shoes digging into his ribcage, the pole raked repeatedly across

his cheekbones and upraised knuckles, the high-five over his body.

Donald Trump was right, said Scott. And Trump said: The people 

that are following me are very passionate. His hands fluttered 

as he spoke, a demagogue’s hands, no blood under the fingernails, 

no whiff of urine to scrub away.  He would orchestrate the chant 

of Build That Wall at rally after rally, bellowing till the blood rushed 

to his face, red as a demagogue in the grip of masturbatory dreams:

a tribute to the new conquistador, the Wall raised up by Mexican hands,  

Mexican hair and fingernails bristling in the brick, Mexican blood 

swirling in the cement like raspberry syrup on a vanilla sundae. 

On the Cinco de Mayo, he leered over a taco bowl at Trump Tower.

Not for him the fiery lake of the false prophet, reddening

his ruddy face. Not for him the devils of Puritan imagination,

shrieking in a foreign tongue and climbing in the window

like the immigrant demons he conjures for the crowd.

Not even for him ten thousand years of the Leader brothers.

streaming a fountain of piss in his face as he sputters forever.

For him, Hell is a country where the man in a hard hat

paving the road to JFK station sees Guillermo and dials 911;

Hell is a country where EMTs kneel to wrap a blanket around

the shivering shoulders of Guillermo and wipe his face clean;

Hell is a country where the nurse at the emergency room

hangs a morphine drip for Guillermo, so he can go back to sleep.

Two thousand miles away, someone leaves a trail of water bottles

in the desert for the border crossing of the next Guillermo.

We smuggle ourselves across the border of a demagogue’s dreams:

Confederate generals on horseback tumble one by one into 

the fiery lake of false prophets; into the fiery lake crumbles

the demolished Wall. Thousands stand, sledgehammers in hand, 

to await the bullhorns and handcuffs, await the trembling revolvers. 

In the full moon of the flashlight, every face interrogates the interrogator. 

In the full moon of the flashlight, every face is the face of Guillermo.

—Martín Espada

Espada wrote the second poem especially for the Lights for Liberty rally.

The mass incarceration of migrant children—by the thousands—is also a hate crime. Let’s call it what it is. And that brings me to a place called Tornillo. The Trump Administration opened the Tornillo internment center in Texas in June 2018 and closed it in January 2019. My good friend Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, as Director of Research and Advocacy at Hope Border Institute in El Paso, was a major organizer in the campaign to shut down Tornillo—and shut it down they did.

Camilo told me: “the one place the kids detained there told us they felt free was on the soccer field . . . It was the only place they could be connected in some kind of physical flow with the world beyond the barbed wire, by kicking as many soccer balls as high and as far as they could, beyond the fencing around them. Large numbers of these balls piled up quickly outside and at the edges of the facility.”

Latino youth play soccer.

Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed Wire Fence

          Tornillo…has become the symbol of what may be the largest U.S. mass detention of children not charged with crimes since the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans. —Robert Moore, Texas Monthly

Praise Tornillo: word for screw in Spanish, word for jailer in English,  

word for three thousand adolescent migrants incarcerated in camp.

Praise the three thousand soccer balls gift-wrapped at Christmas,

as if raindrops in the desert inflated and bounced through the door.

Praise the soccer games rotating with a whistle every twenty minutes 

so three thousand adolescent migrants could take turns kicking a ball.

Praise the boys and girls who walked a thousand miles, blood caked  

in their toes, yelling in Spanish and a dozen Mayan tongues on the field.

Praise the first teenager, brain ablaze like chili pepper Christmas lights,

to kick a soccer ball high over the chain link and barbed wire fence.

Praise the first teenager to scrawl a name and number on the face

of the ball, then boot it all the way to the dirt road on the other side.

Praise the smirk of teenagers at the jailers scooping up fugitive 

soccer balls, jabbering about the ingratitude of teenagers at Christmas.

Praise the soccer ball sailing over the barbed wire fence, white

and black like the moon, yellow like the sun, blue like the world.

Praise the soccer ball flying to the moon, flying to the sun, flying to other 

worlds, flying to Antigua Guatemala, where Starbucks buys coffee beans.

Praise the soccer ball bounding off the lawn at the White House,

thudding off the president’s head as he waves to absolutely no one.

Praise the piñata of the president’s head, jellybeans pouring from his ears, 

enough to feed three thousand adolescents incarcerated at Tornillo.

Praise Tornillo: word in Spanish for adolescent migrant internment camp, 

abandoned by jailers in the desert, liberated by a blizzard of soccer balls.

—Martín Espada

On a personal note, Espada second poem evoked one of the few specific stories that my father, W.M. Murfin, ever told me about his World War II experiences.

Italian POWs in Libya--glad to be out of the war.

He was the top sergeant of a U.S. Army Field Hospital attached to the British and ANZAC troops under Field Marshal Montgomery who chased Rommel and his Afrika Korps out of Egypt and across North Africa.   In the deserts of Libya the hospital pitched its tents next to a prisoner of war camp for captured Italian troops.  Most of the Italians had gladly surrendered and were happy to be out of the war.  The Tommies in their khaki shorts and tin hats for the most part treated the prisoners well.  They reserved their rage and vengeance for the Germans and Nazis.

Aside from some hastily erected gun towers, the camp had no walls or even barbed wire fence.  There was no need—there was nowhere to escape to in the vast and terrible desert.  Lines literally scratched in the ground were the only marks of the camp’s perimeter. 

The Brits gave their prisoners some of their footballs to kick around to pass the time.  The Italians quickly organized teams and were playing il calico—soccer—on the sands.  One idle afternoon under the baking sun patients and staff from the hospital joined inmates and guards to watch a match.

During the back and forth action the ball got kicked out of bounds and across the camp’s line in the sand.  Without thinking a player sprinted after it.  When he crossed the line without even a shouted warning, a guard shot him dead.

Of all of the horror my Dad saw in the war in North Africa and then in three Pacific island landings this one senseless execution haunted him the most.

Christmas Eve When Traitorous Peace Broke Out

Note:  Today is the 100th anniversary of what became known as the Christmas Truce on the Western Front in France in the first year of World War I.  General interest in the bloody conflict that ushered in the era of industrialized warfare with death and destruction of previously unimaginable level has been raised by the centenary and the now semi-legendary truce.  I counted more than a dozen links to items about the Truce posted on my Facebook page yesterday and expect more today, of which this will become just another example.

But it was not always so.  Despite heavy press coverage when it happened, the bitterness of nearly four more years of horrendous mass slaughter and the renewal of even worse hostilities15 years later buried the memory.  It helped that officials on both sides tried to erase it from the consciousness of both the public and their armies.  In 1934, for instance, a Nazi playwright churned out a drama in which a well-meaning German officer trying to bring a Christmas tree across the lines is killed by a British sniper and “all of the lights of the Christmas tree shot out.” 

During the Vietnam era when anti-war sentiment surged around the world dribs and drabs of the story began to come out in things like the English film O What a Lovely War, staring John Lennon.  Then in 1984 Wisconsin balladeer John McCutcheon wrote his haunting ballad Christmas in the Trenches which slowly gathered an international following.  Mike Harding’s song Christmas 1914 in 1989 and Garth Brooks in 1997’s Belleau Wood, also told versions of the story. 

In 2001the book Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce by Stanley Weintraub renewed interest in the story.  It was followed in 2005 by the critically ac

claimed French film Joyeux Noel.  Since then there have been TV documentaries produced in Britain, Germany, and the United States.

The resurgence of interest that began with Weintraub’s book came close on the heels of the shock and horror of 9/11 and coincided with the launch of the so-called War on Terrorism and the parade of unremitting war since then.  No longer do massive national armies clash on open battlefield.  Instead shadowy enemies from an alien culture make asymmetrical war on civilian populations and meet retaliation by indiscriminate attacks by our technologically superior war machine.  Both sides believe that sufficient terror will lead to a triumph over a demonized enemy.  It is almost impossible now to imagine ordinary combatants on either side recognizing the common humanity of the enemy let alone laying down arms to embrace them, even for a moment.

But we, the whole world, are profoundly war weary now.  When we hear the impossible story of the Christmas Truce, how deeply but unspokenly do we yearn to make it come true again.  Perhaps enough yearning can make it so.

Below is my account of the Truce, reposted from 2012.

German and English troops celebrating Christmas together.

Today, of course, is Christmas Eve.  In the Biblical story, set centuries afterwards by the Church at this time to correspond with traditional the Roman solstice festival of Saturnalia, an angel appeared to shepherds abiding in their fields:

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Unfortunately in the long history of humanity since the days of the old miracle story, peace on earth and good will toward men has often been in short supply.  War and more war seemed the inevitable fate of human kind.  Although Christmas and other Holy Day truces were sometimes observed by medieval feudal armies, by the 19th Century industrial warfare had transformed battlefields into remorseless mass killing fields.  Old notions of gallantry toward enemies were quickly fading.

In December of 1914 the Great War, as it was beginning to be called on all sides, was less than six months old.  Any visions of heroic charges and quick victories cherished by both sides had quickly evaporated against the grim reality repeating rifles, machine guns, and mass artillery that had made the old warfare of maneuver and attack obsolete. 

On the Western Front in France the war had settled into a bloody stalemate.  Both sides dug in with make-shift trenches where men lived and died for days on end between futile attacks over a no man’s land between the lines.  As winter closed in the trenches filled with water and slush.  Mud walls often collapsed, burying soldiers alive.  Neither side had good winter uniforms and the men were suffering horribly from cold.

Many of the soldiers on both sides of the line that winter were not the highly disciplined professional troops that were the core of both the German and Allied armies.  Most had been reservists, volunteers or draftees—civilians only months before.  That winter many had not yet been trained or embittered to be remorseless killing machines.

Early on the day of Christmas Eve something strange happened, mostly on the section of the front where British and Imperial troops faced the Germans south from the bloody Ypres salient for 27 miles to the La Bassee Canal.  Here and there firing stopped.  Men in the trenches, often as close a 70 yards apart, began to shout at one another offering Christmas greetings.  Singing broke out in both trenches, and sometimes the two sides joined in common carols—particularly Silent Night (Stille Nacht) and O Tannenbaum (O Christmas Tree.)

Stories differ on how this fraternization spread to become informal local truces.  In at least one spot, the Germans sent a man with a white flag across no man’s land to request a cease fire to celebrate a beloved Captain’s birthday on the trench parapet.  The English officer in charge agreed and crossed back to make arrangements with his counterparts.  In other areas British troops simply allowed the Germans to erect small decorated Christmas trees sent to the lines by the High Command along the trenches.  In other places more formal truces were arranged so that each side could safely retrieve the many bodies that littered no man’s land.

By afternoon troops were out of their trenches and mingling between the lines.  Both the British and Germans had received special Christmas packages of tobacco and sweets.  The men began exchanging some of these items as well as souvenirs like buttons off their uniforms and trinkets from home, even family pictures.  Officers shared their bottles of Scotch, Schnapps, or French wine.  German enlisted men swapped kegs of beer with British soldiers for Bully Beef and jam.  By evening the truce had spread across the entire section of the front and had even taken hold in some additional sectors manned by French and Belgian troops.

That evening some troops engaged in common mess on the battle field and mingled for hours in celebration.  When word got back to the British Command, miles behind the lines, stern order and dire warnings of severe punishment for fraternizations were sent to the front.  Similar orders came from German generals.

 

This resin model for a new bronze statue commemorating the Christmas Truce and the the football--soccer--games that were played was recently installed out side of bombed-out St. Luke's Church in Liverpool.  The church was destroyed during the World War II Blitz.  Sculpted by Andy Edwards and named All Together Now.

But the truce not only held on Christmas morning, it continued to spread.  Up and down the line several soccer games and other competitions were organized through the day.  More dinners were arranged for that evening.

But it could not last.  With more pressure from the Brass Hats desultory firing began that night.  British medical officer Captain J. C. Dunn recounted how it ended in his sector:

At 8.30 I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with “Merry Christmas” on it, and I climbed on the parapet.  He [the Germans] put up a sheet with “Thank you” on it, and the German Captain appeared on the parapet.  We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches, and he fired two shots in the air, and the War was on again.

But in some areas the informal truce lingered for a day or two and in other sectors no serious fighting resumed until early January, 1915.  A handful of officers and men were disciplined by the British for disobeying orders or fraternization.

Word of the Christmas truce, complete with photographs, made a sensation in the British press and was also less widely publicized in Germany.  Over the years the event has taken on legendary, even mythical status.     Some much later accounts promoted by Christians pin the event on the actual intercession of Angels and a shared vision of a star-like object in the sky.  Peace advocates have long seized on the story as an example of how common soldiers could end war by simply refusing to fight. 

 

On the other hand, military pragmatists continue to condemn the unauthorized outbreak of peace.  Most armed forces, including the U.S. have developed specific “command and control” policies to nip any future movements toward goodwill across lines in the bud.