We met at 3:00 at our site and people began arriving, although the poet Carolyn Scarr was already there, talking with Darryl Berman. Doris Rodriquez arrived shortly after that. Theresa Cameranesi and Judy Liteky arrived with Nico Udu-gama and the folk singer Faith Petric, who turned 96 on September 13th. Theresa was carrying Faith’s guitar. Bernardo Pimentel and Armando Nuñez were there setting up the computer and sound system with my husband, Jim Forsyth. Kristina Burnett arrived, and later on Al Mendall also arrived.

I started talking about the event and about the School of the Americas in order to introduce Nico, who suggested we sit in a circle. We introduced each other and why we were there and doing this type of work… Some comments that were very meaningful included Darryl’s that we create these relationships that help us do the work that needs to be done to change the world… we all resonated to that, to the work and to the relationships, so we spoke about our various work and our various passions… I had talked about the April meeting in DC where we participated in a ‘die-in’ in front of the White House, but said that we had also accompanied Father Roy Bourgeois as he responded to the Vatican Embassy’s demand that he recant on his support for the ordination of women as Roman Catholic priests, and I asked Faith to sing the song “If you haven’t got a penis then you can’t have a priest,” which is irreverent enough but is very much, in a humorous way, about change. Carolyn Scarr then recited a poem, I followed suit with my poem Blood Mixed with Milk, published in the Friends’ Journal, Kristina recited a translation of a German poem about the First World War, called Two Soldiers, Nico recited a José Martí call-out, which had a refrain, Levántate y anda (Get up and walk), and Theresa recited a poem from a Chilean friend about spring. Carolyn did another poem, Faith another song, I read Verse for a Sad Grandbaby, and I will post all the poems and lyrics tomorrow.

Here are the poems read by Carolyn Scarr, in PDF files.
[file]https://100tpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/AllahAkbar.pdf[/file]
[file]https://100tpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/AgriefIcannotknow.pdf[/file]
[file]https://100tpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Piet.pdf[/file]
[file]https://100tpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Wasted1.pdf[/file]

Poems by Silvia Brandon Pérez

Verse for a Sad Grandbaby
Hush now, don’t speak,
right now the moon
is trying on her dress of clouds;
we must not interrupt the show.
We’ll light twelve candles,
steal a star or ten,
eat buttered popcorn,
sing Christmas songs in June,
and talk about the zebra and her coat.

I’ll tell you one and twenty stories,
acquaint you with the ant that danced,
the elephant that wore eyeglasses,
the boy that made it past the sun
bicycle and all,
and lend you that old handkerchief
embroidered by abuela, the one with posies,
to dry that spot of wetness near your eyes.

We’ll eat hot garlic soup with bread
spoonfed with aeroplanes and trains,
watch a movie, groucho’s antics
or pick a soggy one to cry
and later,
when sun and moon no longer fight,
we’ll cuddle up
order confetti dreams
and sleep ensconced
in orange lullabies.
http://www.eclectica.org/v3n3/perez_grandbaby.html

———————————————–
Welcome, death
And so it is confirmed:
the latest, not least mourned
because of death so near
the year’s end

has found a final rest
amid the noise and excrescence
of putrid war; three thousand
of our gallant young

NAME NOT RELEASED YET
which but means
the mother does not know,
the spouse or sister, father,

will receive
that fateful phone call,
the one all lovers of a fighter
dread to hear,

Dear Sir or Madam, we regret
your child or spouse or loved one
is now dead; we’ll ship
all the remains aboard

a busy plane, they will unload it
at the end, after all passengers
have disembarked; we would not want
our passengers disturbed,

he/she was brave in dying
as in life; you may not know
the reason death was found so far away
from home and hearth and love

because a nation’s greed or apathy,
our bloodied hands, with military fervor
must salute the master of disgrace,
heil conquering hero,

welcome, death.
—————————————-
Science Lesson

The square root of fifteen
is five, he said; the answer to the endless
question of the here and now IS then.
Democritus contrived a theory that space,
the Void, had equal dibs with Being, or reality,
the Void a vacuum filled with particles
eternal and invisible. From there to bombs
and mushroom clouds winging their way
across the unreality of time and space
to death.

When younger and myopic I saw lights
as fusion of their shapes and colors: beauty.
With glasses fuzzy beauty was resolved
to dirty streets, with crime and garbage
everywhere. Ultimate good, which D. described
as cheerfulness, a state in which the soul
lives tranquilly, eludes me.

The naked city, she that never sleeps,
is now a place of terror for the ones
who do not fit the picture.
The volume of a cone is but one third
that of a cylinder (same base and equal
height). Poetry’s atoms have been split
by hatred. The total mass of the reactants
in a chemical reaction equal total mass
of products. Darkness abounds.
The total mass of fear and prejudice
and anxious nightmares equals bullets
nightsticks hate and death.
Dalton and Lavoisier redeemed.
God weeps.

————————————————
Blood mixed with milk (written on the occasion of the death of a mother and infant by a smart bomb)

I imagine that the babe that lies
with its small eyes closed forever
nursed from your breast, and that with that hand
with which you kept him to your last breath
from death, you changed his diapers, nestled him
toward the nipple bursting with white milk, that cream
our breasts create for the nourishment
of our small ones, I imagine that perhaps,
minutes before the bomb, before that scream
that sealed his tears and yours for eternities
I neither understand nor care explaining,
he might have bitten you with that smile
of infants when they nurse, smiling
from a taste of godly feasting, and then a noise
and a world in flames and clusters of emissaries
of death on the wing, and a roar that maybe
left you deaf there toward the end so you couldn’t hear
your baby’s scream, and left you blind so you could not see
how your blood mixed with milk in the mouth of an innocent.

Sangre mezclada con leche

Me imagino que aún este bebé que yace
con sus ojitos cerrados para siempre
lactaba de tu seno, y que con esa mano
con que lo guardaste hasta el suspiro último
de la muerte le cambiabas pañales, lo acomodabas
al pezón rebosante de leche blanca, de la crema
que crean nuestros pechos para el sustento
de nuestras criaturas, me imagino que tal vez
unos minutos antes de la bomba, antes de ese grito
que selló su llanto y el tuyo por eternidades
que no comprendo ni me interesa el explicar,
tal vez te había mordido con la sonrisa esa
de los niños cuando lactan, sonriente
de probar manjar de dioses, y luego un ruido
y el mundo en llamas y racimos de emisarias
de la muerte al vuelo, y un estruendo que tal vez
te dejó sorda ya al final para no oir los chillidos
de tu crío, y que algo te dejó ciega para no comprobar
como su sangre se mezclaba con la leche en boca de inocente.