This poem is about spring,
and the coming of rain after the dry season,
and the blooming of wild flowers,
all of them red.
This poem is about love,
and the romantic idea that the heart
is not a shape or a symbol,
but an organ in struggle.
1967 --
Genocide in Vietnam,
entire villages dropped into
American briefcases and disappeared,
that year and every year,
as long as the night sky promises bombs
and not stars,
and peasants leave this world drinking
the poison meant for their fields,
spring can arrive only with the
violent crash of thunder,
and love resides as much in the embrace
of the lover
as in the rifle of the guerrilla.
Naxalbari --
when your ground cracked open in May,
the ghosts of the debt-ridden, the lynched,
the tea plantation workers
who died without knowing the joy of a single spring,
streamed forward like an angry flood
and spoke through the spears of the living.
In Washington,
the powerful had nightmares for days,
but even then they could not find you
on their maps.
The problem, they told themselves,
was that you no longer believed
in the cycling of the seasons
and the renewal of the old world.
You believed in the spiral of the dialectic,
the beauty of the unknown,
and the hope buried in the contradiction.
In Newark and Detroit,
no maps were needed to know that
Naxalbari was liberated territory,
to know that Lal Salaam meant
Power to the People,
to know that spring thunder was a
harbinger of the long hot summer.
