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Pan-American

This hot and moving blood now knows
there's more to hunger than the starving,
something more to emptiness than the ache
no anger fills and no steel stops.

I've hungered only in the dark,
and died just once if some deaths are called dying.
Still the things men dreamed deadly to their flesh
made me heir to anger
long before I saw sunlight pierce the bone
and long after the living limbed themselves with steel
fighting to gain a dollar or a day,
a marriage of metals, steel machined by steel
until the angry stumbled blind into the grave
mined by the spellbound commerce of diplomat and dictator.
The land became more wound than womb
and I begged of history no parallel
but dust to dust.

Here in these great republics the hungry see
the harvest fall to the feast of dollars stuck
under the land's gagged fat
the same as when it was the famine
of the fist, the gun.
But though defeated and dead some heirs demand
men share what they labor, food and blood, death and birth,
dark clots at heart and crotch
caught between the cage of the inmost fiber
and the coal of the utmost genital.


Therefore I drive midnight through all my wounds,
hunger through all my words,
on and on until the wish has gathered in the gut.
My heart, my land, it is the courage to starve to death
I work to give or to get.

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