A Nosa Terra

I

I find my reflection,

in spite of the devastation of  this accursed progress, in spite of the prepotent vulgarity that is this new American Europe that’s invaded every crevice of this ancient land...I can still stand on this Galician hill by the sea. An emigrant returned home a thousand years later, or ago, to ancestral shores. These shores, once dotted with small, isolated farming villages raided by marauding Vikings, are now over-developed and crowded with power lines. Still being invaded. Still being attacked...

Yet, somehow, a part of the land remains breathing and  free. I feel I know the secret language of these hills, of these rías...the smell of this struggling land. Can’t commodify inherent intimacy through cyberspace. Not yet. These invaders, native and foreign, don’t know this language. They don’t hear it or feel it. It doesnt belong to them...They must silence it.  

Tonight new homemade wine, total resistance and no patience; there is no time for self-deception left in me. Action burns in my heart and in my mind. I compile words of resistance in three languages. “The word is our weapon” say the compañeros in Chiapas. So a word in three languages should become three weapons. It should...

These words…I need to live them, feel them, nurture them, polish them, fire them… or  I don’t exist, I am not breathing, I am dead. 

II

I now look at this storm brewing; How wonderful and how frightening.  I saw it tonight by accident in a mirror of sea and sky. Mere reflection of what is there in my eyes too…In the eyes of millions. That something that says to constantly live, love, think, talk, hope, act, arise, destroy, build or you might silently become one of them; one of those who’ve ceased to be outraged by injustice, unaware of their crime, of their madness. 

I taste of new wine and action. I can almost touch the warm body of the lover waiting for me across the ocean…Revolutionary thoughts are love thoughts; active, vibrant, and sensuous; transcending. Particularly when contemplating change on lonely cliff-sides by the Cantabrian Sea. There is enough death, life, rain, and salt here to ignite love in a hundred  desperate hearts. Standing  on the edge of time with my eyes closed, I lick the salt and rain off my lips and let the wind sway me. One wrong step and I could drown in this now satisfied longing for the sound of these waves crashing all around me. 

To the north, sister Ireland. To the east, sister Euskadi. In the ria behind me, my father, and his father, and his mother, and all of the mothers and fathers of our peasant family were born. I’ve imagined or been told we have all stood upon this same cliff and faced the same ocean for hundreds of years. I don’t doubt it. We humans are not as unique in our actions and emotions as we might wish to believe. The cult of the uniqueness of the individual is another bourgeois myth. We all love, and cry, and laugh , and feel, or not, accordingly. And we all know why anyone would want to come here this late at night; a place for lovers, thinkers, criminals, dreamers, cowards, heroes, suicidals and revolutionaries...

 Time, time, time. Time keeps pressing under my skin through tears of fire for what’s been lost. Beyond the horizon, I retrieve a hundred forgotten memories, and grip that eternal longing for a comrade with a storm upon her shores and a flame in her heart hot enough to warm the frigid waters of this Costa de la Muerte. To lay with me. Ride out this storm. Feel me. Arm me.

By Adrian Boutureira 
Galicia, March 1, 2003

5.30 am

Two powerful Galician women; a poet and a singer.

Listening to them while reading this piece, brings me back to that space...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVozIC8HXX8

Negra Sombra, a poem by Rosalia de Castro
Música de Xoan Mont, performed by Luz Casal and Carlos Nuñez

Left Behind

Captured by your isolation in that damned Sunday light. Arizona mountains sinking under heavy purples, making it hard not to weep for all that is lonely. Your cat hiding under the sink for hours; my guitar against a naked wall; you in that apartment, huge, empty, gray; ceiling so high the moments floated away never to come back down, never to be recaptured.

Mi cuarto sin ti

Inanimate menagerie of shapes and colors 

Once awakened alive by our bodies

by laughter and tears, by touch and taste... 
By our scent 

Das Commute

501 Express, Brighton-Downtown. The bus is full. As the diesel engine roars to a cruising speed, that is all you hear. It’s eerily quiet save for the recorded message in the bus’ intercom reminding us to keep our patriotic eyes open for abandoned bags and suspicious behavior…

Can the weird quietness be due to a city-wide call for some prolonged moment of silence over yesterday’s reported murder of civilians in Iraq? I wonder…At the risk of being reported by the other riders to the driver for suspicious behavior, I dare to look around and check for emotion in the eyes of my fellow bus riders to explore my moment of silence theory…Looks like I was wrong.

The faces of the 40 plus people on the bus are not reflective of any emotion over the war, or over the pending terrorist attack  by Israel against the Palestinian people, or over the sight of the homeless people downtown that we see out of our bus’ window every day. No. These are emotionless faces I see. Made silent in their expressions through what appears to be an interconnected web of i-pod wires and one giant glossy magazine with few words and lots of pictures. New England White faces from a world where compartmentalization, fear of “the other”, individualist isolation and consumption of mass media have triumphed. As if a barrage of celebrity pictures and mediocre pop music could fill the abyss of our desperate loneliness…

40 people intentionally avoiding eye contact, fearfully avoiding the power of words uttered by the person next to them but not those blasting out of their plasma screens. Fear of what could happen if the plastic barrier of their over-sized sunglasses were to melt. After all, maybe they know that dioxin is a very dangerous byproduct of molten plastic…

Maybe I’ve just gone crazy, or maybe we are all simply waiting…Our perceived complacency and apathy but a temporary lapse in our trajectory to inner transformation, a frozen moment of metamorphosis before we erupt into spontaneous celebration and the embracing of the culture of refusal and revolution…

Wait. I hear a voice. Maybe someone in the back is reading my thoughts and popping open the Cuban rum!

Wrong again…

“Hello”, says someone behind me, one of the i-pod earphone wires dangling over his shoulder while he places the phone to his ear, “we are entering the freeway now. It’s jammed. I’ll be late. Bye.”

The advertiser in my head says, “Stuck in traffic? Sprint is there for you with coverage in all 50 states and with unlimited daytime minutes. Not bad. Can I sell this? Then again, no one wants to talk without limits anymore. In-depth communications hinders our addiction to mindless distraction…